


how to chain a dragon

by a_sober_folly



Series: a dragon never stops growing, as long as she has food and freedom [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: AU! Rhaenys lives, Anxiety, Canon-Typical Xenophobia, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, backround basically everyone, canon-typical mentions of incest, mentions of balerion, mentions of targs everywhere, non-recipricated cousin crush, possibly canon-typical internalized homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-08-27 21:49:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 22,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8418190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_sober_folly/pseuds/a_sober_folly
Summary: Rhaenys is the daughter of a princess of Dorne, and of a crowned prince of Westeros. She is the granddaughter of two rulers, and a cousin stands to rule Dorne after her uncle’s death. When she is included in the royal entourage as the hostage she is, she is  called “the lady Rhaenys”, possessing no title of her own.(Or: Rhaenys Targaryen lives, but nothing really changes)





	1. found

She is five when she is pulled out from nothing, a girl in rags and bare feet. She is five when crimson-and-gold caped men escort her to King’s Landing. She is five when she meets the new King in her old home for the first time, her words locked in her head, unable to speak. He terrifies her no less than her grandfather had. She has only hazy memories of Mad Aerys-- long nails, a hissing voice, the smell of blood and meat and flesh (that is the strongest, she thinks, and she cannot forget, much as she tries)-- but this king looks at her with such disgusted hate that she can only hope her curtsy can save her life. She knows he has to be king because only the King can sit the Iron Throne, and he’s doing that now. Ser Jaime Lannister the Kingslayer of the Kingsguard holds her shoulder, mayhaps so she can’t run, or so he can hurt her more easily. It wouldn't be hard to for them to do, not when she is small and they are big. An old man in a white cloak and white armor kneels to the King. He’s wearing white, so it has to be the Kingsguard, yes? He looks so familiar, but Rhaenys can’t remember his name.

“King Robert,” he says. So she was right! The man on Grandfather's throne is the King! “She’s a child, a frightened child.”

“She’s dragonspawn,” the King grumbles. No, she thinks, he’s a king, not a King. Her papa would have been a King, but this handsome and angry man is only a king.

“She’s harmless. She can’t take the throne-- Rhaenyra Targaryen and Prince Aemon’s daughter Rhaenys saw to that,” the old man says. Rhaenys knows better than to say she’s not harmless, knows better than to look at the old man saying names so close to hers.

“And what of Rhaelle Baratheon’s grandson? What happens when she spreads her legs and starts an uprising?” the king roars. Rhaenys doesn’t know who he’s talking about, but she’d learned the words of half a hundred nobles. Ours is the Fury, and the king is a Baratheon.

“My King,” the old man says. “You won the Iron Throne through conquest when you killed Rhaegar Targaryen upon the Trident, and took the Throne after King Aerys’s death. Queen Rhaelle’s blood is nothing-- or near enough. Maegor’s heir Aerea was passed over with her sister Rhalla, and forgotten. Laena and her daughters were dismissed. In the last council, Daeron the Drunken’s daughter and and Aerion’s son were dismissed for age and their sires.”

“Aerea and Rhalla weren’t loyal to Maegor,” the king spits. He must know who the old man means. The names are so familiar to Rhaenys-- she knows she knows them, too. But he must really know who they are, the both of them. It feels almost like the two of them are playing some private game. “And the Drunken’s daughter was simple. Aerion Targaryen’s spawn didn’t grow to challenge his claim-- as hers will.” He throws a finger at Rhaenys. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about Dornish inheritance-- they say the firstborn is heir. They’ll say she’s the rightful ruler of the Seven Kingdoms.”

 _I’m simple!_ She wants to say. _I can be as simple as you want. And I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!_

“My Liege,” Ser Barristan-- that’s his name, Ser Barristan!-- says. “Aerys did not care for Elia of Dorne’s daughter, though her Dornish uncles did dote on her. If you let her live, they will be grateful.”

“No one needs to know,” the king waves a hand. “All know Rhaenys Targaryen went missing in the Sack of King’s Landing. All know that the body of her playmate was found, next to her cat.” A smile curves his lips, and it scares Rhaenys so much she wants to cry. “No one knows she’s been found. How can we even say this is the true Rhaenys Targaryen? She’s a scrap of a child of the right age with Dornish coloring. There’s no look of the dragon about her. She could be an orphan of King’s Landing, or some girl from the desert. She might not even be Westerosi.”

Ser Barristan’s hand tightens on his sword. Rhaenys’s eyes widen. Would he kill the king like Ser Jaime the Kingslayer had killed her grandfather? For her? But he takes a breath, and Rhaenys knows it won’t happen. Mayhaps that’s good. She won’t be blamed for anything if everyone is nice. She lets out a breath, and tries to focus on the other things. She doesn’t understand what the king is saying-- not saying, meaning. She’s Rhaenys Targaryen, daughter of Elia Martell and Rhaegar Targaryen, and she was raised to be a princess, except for last year, which she was told to forget.

“My King, my lords,” a round man says, before anyone can say anything about Ser Barristan and his sword. Rhaenys thinks he looks familiar, and he lets out a giggle at her glance. “Wise Ser Barristan knows the look of Rhaenys, and she was found by your own goodbrother. She has the look of Elia well enough, and Elia’s princely brothers have met their niece. She is no imposter, and we’d be wise to know so. Missing, she’s a threat. Dead, we climbed to the throne over children, and Dorne has another reason to hate us.” Another giggle, and Rhaenys narrows her eyes-- she knows she knows him, too!

“What do you say, Varys?” The king scowls. “She’s a threat to the realm.”

The fat man-- Varys -- spreads his ringed fingers. “Alive, my King, she is proof of your benevolence. In your household, no one can claim her name, or raise banners for her. Alive, my King--” and now Rhaenys likes him, because he wants her to live, too-- “she’s a hostage to keep the Martells quiet. Alive, she keeps the Beggar Prince and his sister away. If he was to invade in his manhood, as was a possibility when dear Lord Arryn convinced you to spare their lives-- why, then he’s a kinslayer, as we can simply execute Rhaenys if there’s a whisper. Dead, you show you fear the Targaryens, and an infant girl scares you.”

She doesn’t like him now, she decides. Her uncle-- Viserys, that’s his name -- he was kind to her when they were safe, and she remembers him holding her hand, and now they say he’s going to get her killed!

“My King,” Ser Barristan says. “She’s a child, and frightened. She’s asleep on her feet. Let me take her to a chamber to sleep--”

“Who is your king, Barristan?” the king thunders. “Who are you loyal to? And you, Spider? Are you loyal to me, or the dragonspawn?”

Ser Barristan bows. “I am the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, my liege. Your Kingsguard. You pardoned me, Your Grace.”

The king lets out a laugh before Varys can say anything. “Get the girl to bed, then. We’ll discuss this on the council. I know what you think of me,” he says to the knight and the old man, “but I am not cruel enough to discuss a little girl’s fate while she shivers.”


	2. childhood

Rhaenys will never know what happened as she slept, or the talks that happened after. Rhaenys will never know what convinced the Baratheon king to spare her, nor will she know how she was permitted to be raised in the Red Keep. All she knows is that she lived, and her mouth was pried open, her words forced out, so that the lords and ladies alike know her tongue was not cut off, so she can sing songs of how well she is treated, of the kindness she receives as Rhaegar Targaryen’s daughter, of how first, she lived in the Maidenvault, and then she was moved in Maegor’s Holdfast like the royal family.

Some may see this as an honor. Rhaenys at the age of nine knows it is not. Her uncle Viserys has had his sixteenth nameday that year, and so is now a man grown. If she is in Maegor’s Holdfast, she is under Robert’s eye more than ever.

Rhaenys is given a small household, as benefits the daughter of a princess of Dorne and the granddaughter of a king, but none of her ladies are Dornish, or even kind. Cerenna Lannister, a cousin of the queen’s, is her first lady, and Rhaenys despises her. The feeling is mutual-- Lady Cerenna rightfully considers herself above an orphan half-Dornish girl. Along with Cerenna Lannister is a natural-born daughter of a Ser Swann, and a penniless orphan cousin of the Carons. House Martell pays for their keep, as they pay for Rhaenys’s dress and food.

It is from her three ladies Rhaenys learns the geography of Westeros. Lannister is a western house, and the lesser Lannisters are of Lannisport. Swann and Carons are marcher lords, and Cyrenna Caron’s father and brother died from Dornish spears. “House Uller,” Cyrenna says, twisting up her mouth. “Your uncle has a bastard Uller for a whore. Half the Ullers are mad, and the other half are worse. What’s your uncle’s whore, I wonder?”

Mylenda (Storm? Waters? It changes from day to day), the daughter of Lord Swann’s brother, is also from the Marches, and like Cyrenna Caron, has no love for Dornish blood. “They creep over the Red Mountains with poison and snakes and scorpions, and they rape women,” Mylenda says. “They’re dishonest and they’re craven. Even a Marcher bastard is worth six Dornishmen.”

Robert leaves for war soon after, and when Rhaenys next sees the queen, the golden woman slaps her face. “Don’t think that the Ironmen will win,” she hisses between clenched teeth. “They will fail and be broken down like their crumbling islands. Do you hope for their winnings? The Ironmen will rape and murder, and they’ll make what happened to your mother and brother a mercy you’ll be crying for. You best pray for them to be an island of skulls.”

Septas and septons and maesters teach her a cobbled-together history of the realm, and focus on the darker points of the Targaryen reign-- the obsession with dragons, the matings of brother to sister, the mad children from those marriages. She learns about the cunning and craven Dornishmen, who fought with poisoned spears and trickery. Rhaenys keeps her mouth shut about the insults.

She grows up, paranoid and cautious. She is Elia’s daughter, not Rhaegar’s. Varys the Spider-- she is sure it is him-- spins a rumor about how close Elia Martell was to Arthur Dayne, the Sword of Mourning, repeats the old tale that Mad Aerys refused to hold her. It is clever, she admits to herself reluctantly. The Daynes are old Dornish nobility, with Valyrian blood and oft have the purple eyes. If she grows to look more Targaryen, the rumors can be stirred up, and doubts cast about her father. But until it is needed, Elia Martell’s trueborn daughter she can stay.

She learns that comparisons to her mother are warnings, some kindly meant, some not. _You have the look of your mother_ is her saving grace, and had likely saved her life. She cultivates the appearance of Elia Martell much as she can. She is only half-Dornish, so she is paler than her lady mother was, but the Targaryens (from Valyrian ancestry, she is sure) brown well. In the days, she lies out in the sun, watched by guards who make sure she will not run from them, and hurl herself into the moat-- though perhaps they would enjoy her to do the latter.

* * *

Rhaenys is ten, and there is a chance remark from her septa. _“Your mother was never bookish_ ” and she freezes, and drops the tome she was holding. It was a collection of songs from the South. Because she knows what that means. Her mother wasn’t bookish; therefore, it is a comparison to her father. She must stay away from those. “I’m done,” she says, a look of disgust on her face. “The words were pretty, but they were too long.”

(She doesn’t pick up another book again for months)

* * *

 Rhaenys is eleven, and a summer sickness has King’s Landing in its grasp. While no one dies, it is certainly inconvenient. The Red Keep near grinds to a halt as the small council vomit up everything to pass their lips save honey-water, beer and an herb mixture. Even Prince Joffrey falls prey, and Rhaenys hides herself, in case she’s blamed.

Maester Pycelle checks up on her. She tries to fake the symptoms, but he clicks his tongue and she can tell he knows she’s lying. “You are robust,” he says quickly. “You should thank the gods you are not sickly like--”

“Like Elia of Dorne,” she finishes for him. She doesn’t know if he’s trying to give her a warning, or if he’s truly pleased for her health, or (more likely) disappointed in her good health. “I’ll give thanks to the Mother.”

So she has a new task now, to make herself ill and weak. Rhaegar was strong, and Elia was not. She must be like her lady mother again. Rhaenys watches those affected, studies them carefully so she can copy their sickbed behaviors. She shoves her fingers down her throat to vomit and picks at her food. Cerenna Lannister leaves for Casterly Rock to be with her family, and Robert sends away Cyrenna Caron and Mylenda Storm/Waters.

* * *

 

Once the sickness is over, they travel to the Reach. The king forbids her to meet the Tyrells, who had been Targaryen loyalists. She wants to laugh. She’s bathed in the sun and is brown as a true salty Dornishwoman. The Tyrells will see only another Martell, see only the Red Viper of Dorne who crippled their heir. Perhaps he worries because Willas Tyrell was likely once a potential husband for her. But he need not worry-- the Tyrells would never accept a Martell, even a half Martell, for their goodfamily, much less their heir.

They visit the Citadel, and Rhaenys wishes she could train to be a Maester, as her great-great-great uncle is. She isn’t supposed to know that, but she does. She can’t quite say how she knows, but it’s some type of general knowledge she was told once years ago, and has seized onto.

She is watched, of course-- she is a Targaryen claimant talking to men who advise, heal, and kill. One acolyte, five or so years older than she is, is kind to her, and is likely to go to a Great House once he completes his chain. He’s no Dornishman, nor a man from a family loyal to the Targaryens, so the eyes on her back are more relaxed.

“I need to be sick,” Rhaenys says, knowing of her risk, knowing the ears around her. “I need to be sick, like mine own mother was.”

Pylos frowns. “I don’t understand, my-- my lady Rhaenys.”

And she can’t explain what she means, how important it is. “I must be sickly. I must be weak. I cannot be a threat,” she tries.

“I cannot give you poisons, my lady,” Pylos says. 

“Please,” she begs. “You can call it medicine and tell Maester Pycelle to watch me take it.”

Pylos frowns, and takes a breath. “I will see what I can do.”

* * *

One month later, they are back in King’s Landing, and Rhaenys receives a necklace of amethysts, pearls, citrines, and other gems Rhaenys has no name for. She knows it has inspected-- especially as it was a gift from Prince Oberyn. Pycelle has told her he has gone over it with a Myrish lens and has found nothing, but if she does, she is to report it. “It is but glass,” he says. “Glass, or colored bits of stone.”

She plays with it. The necklace is heavy and gaudy, with a clasp shaped like a snake. When the necklace is unclasped, the ropes of the necklace somehow change their position and fall into a triangle with a bar at the end. _For defense,_ Rhaenys thinks. One strand can be removed, and seems to be a strand of gold, but when Rhaenys puts it to her mouth, it is merely painted gold. Underneath it is steel. _For attack._ Rhaenys smiles. Now she can protect herself from the king.

* * *

A year passes, and Rhaenys wears her necklace every day, and fakes illnesses. When her bleeding comes upon her, she pretends horrible stomach pains. Her body is supposedly that of a woman’s, though Rhaenys is nearly as flat-chested as she was the year before, and she is still small. Milk of the poppy and dreamwine and a pinch and a half pinch of sweetsleep are forced down her throat until she drifts away in sleep. She wakes to a burning, stinging pain in her lower regions, and is told she was sewn shut, though her moonblood will still leave her body. She can no longer ride a horse astride, and must ride sidesaddle, which still hurts. She takes sweetsleep to pass a painless night, until she cannot. She continues to take milk of the poppy for the pain for weeks after.

One day, she finds her necklace in the mouth of a castle cat, one that is curiously attached to her. As she wrestles Prince Oberyn’s gift out of its mouth, the beast gets away with one of the glass gems. Rhaenys wakes in the middle of the night with the thing vomiting and ill. She watches the cat, curious and distant. If it dies, she will toss it out the window and claim it fell. If it lives, she has her savior. (She cared for animals once, she remembers. She hid under her father’s bed with a cat, and cried out for her father, but she can’t stand furred creatures now)

The cat lives, and Rhaenys crunches crystals between her teeth, swallows them once every week. The necklace is hundreds of small stones, but she doesn’t know how many would kill her.

* * *

 A year later, she visits Casterly Rock with the queen’s retinue. Something about it seems familiar, something about it sends shivers down her spine.

“There are dungeons down here,” Cersei remarks off-handedly. The queen has always hated her, and hates Elia of Dorne more than Rhaegar Targaryen, which puzzles Rhaenys.

“Cold and small and dark,” she responds. “At nights--” and she cuts herself off. She has never been to Casterly Rock. How does she know about the dungeons, so small that a four-year-old has little room to move around, of the mice and lions that can be heard at night?

She must have visited once, she decides. Perhaps when she was a princess, and the night frightened her so she remembered it. The queen smiles, eyes cold as emeralds. “You’re lucky you’re not there, Elia’s daughter.”

“I know,” Rhaenys says.

* * *

Rhaenys continues to grow, and she grows tall and strong, into a build not made for carrying and nursing children. It would do no good for her, she consoles herself. The king’s lusty as a stallion, and it’s all the better that her shape would not arouse him. He would cut her open, and it would hurt. Prince Joffrey would be even crueller. She cannot (will not) have children, so she has no need of hips and breasts.

“You are lucky the King came to power,” her maester says one day. Rhaenys starts, and he smiles. “Yes. You would have made the realm bleed. In Dorne, where Rhoynish law reigns, you would have come before your brother. Your mother would have championed you, and Dorne would have crowned you.”

“No,” Rhaenys says, fighting back tears. “No, I won’t! I wouldn’t!”

“Yes.” He gives a snake-like grin. “Perhaps you would have wed your brother, but what next if you had a girl? What if your brother died? Would you have wed your uncle, the Beggar Prince?”

“No,” Rhaenys says. She knows the game now. “I am loyal to King Robert.”

“What are your House words?” he demands.

 _Fire and blood_ , Rhaenys nearly says, followed by _Unbowed, unbent, unbroken._ But the first answer would have her head on a pike, and the second is not much better. “I have none,” Rhaenys says finally. “I have no words, no sigils, no family.”

“Precisely,” the maester says.


	3. surrender

Lancel Lannister, a boy two years younger than she is, attaches himself to her. He is not overly bright, but he brings her flowers and makes her laugh. _He is a Lannister_ , Rhaenys tells herself. _He is looking to hurt me._ But she is three-and-ten, and friendless. Even a Lannister friend, even the son of a man who is the right hand of Tywin Lannister, and Lancel writes letters to her while he lives in Casterly Rock and she in King’s Landing.

* * *

“Do you hate me?” Princess Myrcella asks one day. Rhaenys has long learned to avoid the golden Baratheon children to keep the king and queen’s eyes off her. The queen scares her, and the few times she is acknowledged by the Lannister woman, it is always with bitterness towards her Dornish mother.

Rhaenys thinks about it. Myrcella is kind, even is she is far younger. Myrcella is Lannister in looks-- the golden family that killed her grandfather and ultimately made the Targaryens lose. Jaime Lannister betrayed her grandfather, and her mother and brother were slaughtered by Lannister hands. Robert Baratheon rose the realm in rebellion and slew her father, and even she has heard the rumor he smiled over her infant brother’s corpse. She still hasn’t forgotten when she was found, and his reactions.

“No,” she says. Just as Rhaenys isn’t her raping father or mad grandfather, or mad ancestors, Myrcella is not her parents. It’s simple as that. Rhaenys hasn’t thought about hating Princess Myrcella or Prince Joffrey or Prince Tommen. It’s too dangerous.

The girl beams, and Rhaenys wraps a slim brown arm around the princess’s white shoulders. Within seconds, however, her arm is pried off by some sworn sword. She swallows her anger. She wouldn’t be as mad to to try to throttle the princess or use her as some sort of shield. Myrcella is four, the same age Rhaenys had been when she vanished. Do they think her such a monster that she might--

“Sing!” The princess begs. “Can you sing a song?”

Rhaenys glances at the princess’s singer, who smiles and begins to strum his lyre. Rhaenys flushes when she realizes the chords. The Dornishman’s Wife, a song she knows well, one oft sung in her presence. But when she begins, the song is something drawn from within her. She’s singing from memory, but it sounds wrong, it’s not right to her ears, even though she knows the words aren’t the problem.

“ _The Dornish princess was as fair as the sun,_  
_and her kisses were warmer than spring.  
But her girl-lover’s blade was made of white steel,_  
_and its kiss was a terrible thing.  
The Dornish princess would sing as she bathed,_  
_in a voice that was sweet as a peach,  
But her girl-lover’s blade had a song of its own,  
and a bite sharp and cold as a leech.  
As I lay on the ground with the darkness around,_  
_and the taste of blood on my tongue,  
My brothers knelt by me and prayed me a prayer,  
and I smiled and I laughed and I sung:  
Brothers, oh brothers, my days here are done,_  
_My lovers have taken my life,_  
_But what does it matter, for all men must die,_  
 _And I love both our girl and my wife!_ ”

As Rhaenys trailed off, the harpist was puzzled. “I’ve never heard that version before.”

“It’s popular in Dorne,” Rhaenys said quickly, hoping that was the case. “It’s to jape at the Daynes, see? A woman trying to be the Sword of Morning--”

“No, my lady.” The harpist shakes his head. “I’ve traveled to Dorne, and I’ve never heard it.”

“I liked it,” the princess said. “It’s so romantic, he still loves them!”

“Yes,” Rhaenys says uncomfortably. “He does.”

“Were they all three together?” Myrcella asks, green eyes wide.

Before Rhaenys can respond, the harpist cuts in. “No doubt. The Dornish are filthy, with strange lusts. They’ll bed anything that moves, and this Martell princess and her Dayne lover came to regret their decisions, and became septas to atone for their wickedness.”

“No,” Rhaenys says, before she can think. “It’s a song, so they lived in Dorne until the end of their lives, and raised their children by their man. He was dying when they killed him, or crippled. They gave him a kind, merciful ending, and he loved them for that.”

Myrcella beams. “I like your version better.”

* * *

Rhaenys is sixteen now, and she swears fealty to King Robert before all in King’s Landing, first in the morning between trembling lips and shaking hands, next in front of the small council with Hand and King’s brother and she is bowing and knocking her head against the stone. Because now, more than ever, she must be good. She has spent twelve years in King’s Landing in Baratheon control, watched by Lannister eyes, as a hostage, and now she is of age, and she is Elia and Rhaegar’s firstborn, and now more than ever, they can cut off her head and stick it out on a pike, or shove her off into the moat, like what happened to Princess Jaehaera and Queen Helaena. She kneels and knocks her head against the stone until her knees are bleeding and her head is tender, and she weeps.

“Why should I?” Robert demands, and Rhaenys looks him right in the eye as she has been told to, forcing herself not to back down. She has prepared herself.

“I have been told you value bravery and courage. I heard you pardoned men who fought you on the Trident, forgave them yourself, and turned enemies into loyal and leal friends. I have done nothing but been born.” She takes a breath. “And had Rhaegar Targaryen not stolen and raped the Lady Lyanna, my mother would yet live. And for that, I hate him. Were he not dead, I would kill him myself avenge Elia.” She doesn’t know if she’s lying, but it feels almost true. She shivers, scared of what she might have said.

The king accepts her, raises her up with his own hand-- the first time he’s ever touched her. Rhaenys forces herself not to cringe back at his hand on her skin. It is a show, she knows-- the king had already made up his mind. He had wanted to see her humbled, to spit venom at her family. But there is almost something akin to pity or guilt in his blue Baratheon eyes.

“There is to be an example made of you,” Varys the Spider tells her later. “You are to swear allegiance to the king, revoke all claims publicly.” A pause. “Dorne is commanded to send representatives.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aka i half-ship Elia and Lyanna, and Elia/Ashara  
> Rhaegar totally changed it to tease them
> 
> And also-- if you were raised under Robert's reign-- wouldn't you hate Rhaegar, too?


	4. adulthood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, trigger warning! There's a nongraphic suicide attempt at the end of this chapter.

Tyene is a woman grown of perhaps twenty years, bronzed and dark as her sire, as dark as Rhaenys tries to be. Deep-chested, with falls of heavy gold hair, and eyes blue as sapphires, Tyene is surely the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen.

“Cousin,” she says, kissing Rhaenys’s face.

“Cousin,” Rhaenys says, smiling.

“This is my sister Nymeria,” Tyene says, with a grand gesture towards another person Rhaenys hasn’t seen. Nymeria is a handful of years older than Rhaenys, older than the Lady Tyene, younger than the Beggar Prince. Palely olive-skinned, black-haired, and dark-eyed, Nymeria is beauty and dignity. Rhaenys wants to make her smile, to please her.

“Tyene’s mother was a septa of the Reach,” says another woman, one Rhaenys had nearly missed. “Nym’s was a noblewoman of old Volantis. Mine was Norvosi.” She walks forward, a smile on her face. Cat-quick, she reaches out to take Rhaenys’s hand. Her eyes look familiar, Rhaenys ought to know them, she wants to weep and laugh, and fling her arms around the newcomer “And yours was our aunt Elia.”

“You must be Princess Arianne,” Rhaenys responds, half-rattled by her sudden urges. Quelling the tightness in her chest, she tries to remember what she knows of her mother’s family She has heard that much of her Martell cousins-- her uncle Prince Doran married a foreigner, and his younger brother bedded with men and women across Dorne. She is uncertain what to do for a minute. The princess is what Rhaenys would have been, had she grown up a princess. Arianne is small, but lushly-figured, confident and beautiful. Arianne is a true princess, she thinks, and she wishes she was the same. Princess Arianne is not her (their) cousin Lady Nymeria, and Rhaenys is grateful. If Princess Arianne was beautiful in the same way as Lady Nymeria, Rhaenys wouldn’t know what to do.

“We are cousins, are we not?” the woman responds. “Then I must be Arianne and you must be Rhaenys, and. . .” she turns to the the lady Nymeria Sand, who gives a slow smile much like that of a snake’s. “Nym and Tyene will do well for our sweet cousins. They are as close as sisters to me, and would have been to you, were you to come with us.”

“I cannot,” says Rhaenys, regretting it. Every curl of word is exquisite, the Dornish accent musical to her ears. Perhaps they speak like her mother did. “I am fortunate that the king summoned you.”

“Summoned to kneel,” the lady Nym said, stroking her braid, the gesture somehow deliciously obscene even were it not against her near-sheer dress. She gave another smile. “As you are a hostage for our behavior, we are for yours and Dorne’s.”

Rhaenys holds her necklace, turns at last to the man in the room. Yes, she thinks, she can see the resemblance the la-- her cousins Nym and Tyene have to their princely sire. They have his eyes, and hairline, she thinks. Nym has his height, Tyene his nose. “You are my uncle,” Rhaenys says, hoping he does not take offense.

“You are mine own niece,” he responds, and gives her a crushing embrace. “You look like her.”

“I know,” Rhaenys says.

“No,” her uncle replies. “You have her kindness.”

Rhaenys untangles herself, trying to see the common threads in his looks to Arianne’s, in Arianne’s to Tyene and Nym’s, in hers to theirs. She doesn’t understand his statement, _you have her kindness_ , but perhaps he will explain later. Perhaps he meant that she did not take after him, or made the statement to somehow distance himself from grief. “The eye of the snake,” she says quickly. “Is it the most deadly?”

“Yes,” Oberyn says, without missing a beat. “The eye of the snake is the most deadly part. And if the Red Viper of Dorne,” he gives a dangerous grin at his title, “would not know, who would?”

“Is it quick?” Rhaenys does not cares that the Spider will hear and know. Let him.

“The bite of a snake is always quick.” Her uncle gives a slow smile like his daughter.

“Tell me of my mother,” she says, quick to change the subject. “I have never met a lord or lady who knew her personally. Tell me of Dorne, for you are the first Dornishfolk I have met.”

He thinks he understands why she changed the subject, she reads in him. “Your mother was smaller than you, by seven inches. She was slender as well, though not like you. She was made to be slender, while you force yourself to be skinny. She had darker eyes than you, and yours are smaller. You have a flatter, wider nose as well. Her face was fuller, and less sorrowful. Her mouth was fuller as well, and wider. Her hair had more curls in it, and it was thicker; you have your father’s hair. Your hair, I suspect, would have more luster than Elia’s if you ate better.  You’ve your father’s brows-- I have hers. Your face, altogether, is sharper than hers. She had a kind wit, and was kind and clever. She had a head for numbers and weaknesses. When she rode someone in the water gardens, or she allowed them to ride her, none could stand before them-- or would, more likely. She couldn’t battle often, but she would have our maesters read to her about wars while she lay in bed. She was beloved of all us of, oft play battles when her health permitted, and be the commander of one side. She would always win.”

Rhaenys closes her eyes, trying to see her. A hazy woman, olive-skinned with curls in her hair, eyes like Princess Arianne’s, slender like Cerenna Lannister had been, with as much kindness in her face as Lady Nym. But it is no use-- the images are distant and disjointed.

“She loved children, even ugly babies. Her dearest lady friend was Ashara of House Dayne, who Elia would take pleasure in pretending to be. At times, Elia would pretend to be ill, and beg Ashara to take her place to meet Lady So-and-So, or Lord Fop. They would see Ashara’s purple eyes and black hair, and think they were meeting the princess, and Elia would laugh about it later.”  

“Did she keep Dorne in her heart?” Did she miss her homeland in King’s Landing? She knew her grandfather misliked her, but did her mother love King’s Landing as much as Rhaenys’s father did not love Elia?

“Had she become queen,” the Red Viper answers slowly, “I believe she would have instituted Rhoynish succession for all heirs.”

* * *

She is dressed the next day, dressed like a princess. Her hair is brushed until it gleams deep and black in the candlelight and sun. Her undergown is a gauzy orange and gold, made of what she believes to be true cloth-of-gold. But before her overgown is wrapped around her, she is chained. Golden fetters wrapped in red silks close around neck, wrists, and ankles. Silver chains connect ankle to ankle, ankles to wrists, and ankles to neck. She can still stand proudly, so they are meant to shout her status to the court, not restrict her movements.

Her overdress is a thing of a beauty, red and orange and yellow of different layers wrapped around each other. She wonders how long it has been waiting for her. A maiden’s cloak is wrapped around her throat, a maiden’s cloak of Targaryen and Martell. The cloak is black, with a red sun in splendor, pierced by a spear. Curled around the spear is the three-headed dragon of the Targaryens, picked out in black thread.

And she is crowned, with a crown from Rhaena Targaryen, a princess who became a septa. Rhaena’s crown is silver, dotted with amethysts, and strands of pale gold and silver hang down, which the maids braid into Rhaenys’s hair.

She looks a Targaryen. She does not have the storied purple eyes, or the well-known locks, but the crown lends silver-gold to her black, and she sees Rhaegar’s daughter. She sees a marriage of the sun, spear, and dragon. She is of Queen Nymeria’s line, of Mors Martell, and of Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters. She see the the daughter of Houses mad and great, ancient and ambitious, passionate and dangerous.

She is led into the Iron Throne’s chambers, walking softly enough to not have her chains clink. “Princess Rhaenys Nymeros,” the herald calls, “of the House Targaryen, trueborn daughter of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen of the Seven Kingdoms and Princess Elia Nymeros Martell of Dorne.”

She’s never been called a princess since her family fell. She supposes perhaps she might be a princess of Dorne like her mother, but she has never been called a princess. Not in this court, not with this ruler. She can’t help but notice that they give her Nymeria’s heritage, shy away from calling her Rhaenys Targaryen. But now she must claim it.

She crosses the room, straight and proud. _Unbowed._

She kneels in front of the throne. _Unbent._

“I, Rhaenys Targaryen--” the name is foreign on her lips. “Do forsake all claims to the Iron Throne. I swear by the old gods beyond count and the light of the Seven, by the gods in the Iron Islands, by the Mother Rhoyne, by the gods of Old Valyria and by the gods with no name from all countries and empires, that I will not seek out the Throne. I will raise no children to fight under the Targaryen banner; I will seek no vengeance for my family. I will not wed, save at my king’s command, and I will bear no children, save at my king’s command. I will be loyal. I will not seek the Iron Throne, for myself or what family remains. I swear it by fire and blood, I swear it by sun and spear, I swear it by Mother and Maiden and Crone.” The oaths, written by men far more clever than she, roll easily off her tongue. She reaches to her crown, untangles it from her hair, and pulls it off. She rises up, stands tall and proud, and throws the crown at the foot of the throne.

It is done. She has sworn.

Rhaenys crunches down on the crystal in her mouth. _Unbroken._


	5. after

She lives. It is not her choice. Oberyn Martell saves her, purges the poison from her body when she collapses, blames it on a footpad, throws suspicion at the Iron Throne, at the Tyrells, at the sons and daughters and lords of the Marches.

Varys visits her as she recovers. “You knew,” Rhaenys tells him, because of course he did. “You knew I had poison around my throat. You knew I’d use it. You should have known I wanted to die.”

Varys shrugs. “It was only an assumption how you would use it.”

“Who else would I use it on?” Rhaenys shakes her head and laughs.. “The king? The queen? Joffrey the prince, or kind princess Myrcella? Sweet Tommen? You should know me, Spider. There is no life I want to take more than mine own. I could be with my family at last.”

“Your mother’s killer. Your brother’s killer.” A pause. “The lord of Lannister.”

“I didn’t know them,” Rhaenys says. “I don’t remember them.” It’s true-- she remembers her grandfather more than her cat, her cat more than her mother, her mother more than her brother. They were words and holes in her heart. She’d lived without them for thirteen years, and she’d survived.

“You don’t hate?”

Rhaenys considers her words, and pushes herself up. Ears other than Varys’s could be listening. “I hate, yes,” she admits. “I hate the man who ripped the healing, bleeding realm in two.” She gives a shrug, not naming who she means, or fully sure who she means. Let him puzzle it out if it is Robert or Rhaegar. “But what is the use? Hate will not keep me safe. Hate will not stop my death at the hands of others.”

“The king remarked that it would not be a great tragedy if you had not survived your uncle’s purging,” Varys says. “Lancel Lannister was distraught, my birds say.  He wept for hours and prayed for you.”

“I am lucky, then, that my kind uncle loves me so.” Rhaenys is not surprised to hear it-- she’d half-expected that if her uncle had leapt to her aid, that the king would have hired a footpad to kill her. She’d planned on it. She wanted to die by her own hand, knowing she had chosen the method, the day. (She ignores what he says about Lancel. She knows by now her first friend was a Lannister ploy, so if she ever came to power, she would remember them as Lancel’s family, not the family who killed hers.)

“Your sweet cousins have taken watch over your door. The Hand didn’t have the heart to turn them away. They seem quite concerned that something would happen, or that you would do something.”

“No,” Rhaenys says. “I won’t.” She wants to die on her own terms-- she will not give King Robert the satisfaction of sending Ilyn Payne after her. If Robert Baratheon takes her life, it it wasted. A thought came to mind-- Varys, really, is the only one like her in this regard. “Did it hurt?”

“Hurt?” Varys seems puzzled.

“Yes,” Rhaenys says. “I was given milk of the poppy, and they sewed me closed whilst I slept.” She does not mention how she cannot stride too wide, how being on a horse causes her pain, how she weeps from pain every time her moonblood comes. “Was yours done while you slept as well?” They are both eunuchs of a kind. Rhaenys might one day be cut open, but she does not know if she can have children, or fuck a man. _Or a woman_ , her mind whispers. She ignores it. She wants to understand him, one eunuch to another.

Varys gives a little giggle. “It was my idea, my lady.” He gives an exaggerated bow, and leaves before Rhaenys can summon a response.

* * *

Oberyn, Arianne, Tyene, and Nym leave for Dorne shortly after, after a brusque demand by the king. Rhaenys gives her farewells, and Nym gives a razor of a smile. “Don’t sorrow for me, cousin,” she says. “Jeyne or Jennelyn Fowler will comfort me well enough.”

Oh, thinks Rhaenys, and then _oh_.

“Take care of yourself,” Oberyn says as he swings up into his saddle. “Elia would haunt me forever if I didn’t watch over her daughter.”

“Uncle,” she says, half-laughing, half-weeping. “Don’t kill anyone in Dorne.”

Tyene gives a smile, tidying her hair as she brushes a hand along their cousin’s hand. “I make no promises, sweet Rhaenys. My father’s daughters were raised to weapons, and their father will do as he wishes.”

Arianne changes her seat on her sand steed, once, twice, thrice. “You’re a Martell,” she says. “Don’t let them take that from you.”

“I am bowed, bent, and broken,” Rhaenys says with a wry grin.

“No,” Oberyn says quickly. He gives a quick smile, leans down and grasps  her hand. “Remember what the Ironborn say.”

He’s slipped a scrap of parchment to her. Rhaenys resolves to check it later.

Arianne is still now, but her mare is not. She shifts, showing Arianne is not as calm as she seems. “I held you when you were young,” the princess says,her familiar eyes full of sorrow. “I don’t remember it, but I must have loved you. I held you when you fell, and as you recovered, I swore to the Mother that I never wanted to hold your body again. Promise me you won’t make me hold you like that again.”

“I promise,” Rhaenys says at once, just to see the relieved look on Arianne’s face, and the smiles on Nym and Tyene’s. Oberyn wheels his steed about, and the Dornish start off. It is only when they are down the King’s road that Rhaenys allows herself to think _Not unless I must._

* * *

 She doesn’t know the Ironborn words. She knows the words of their Houses-- _We do not sow, Though all men do despise us_ \-- to name just two that have stuck with her. She hopes the paper will have an answer, but when she opens it, she only sees _Alleras, Citadel_. Frustrated-- the Citadel is far away and she is unlikely to visit it, she rips it up, and tosses it into her hearthfire.

As it burns, she realizes he gave her the name of an ally. Alleras. She’ll remember it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this as a pretty long one-shot that I've decided to split into chapters that made sense (to me, at least)  
> Let me know what your ideas of the chapter/spacing are!


	6. winterfell

The Hand of the King dies a year later, and Rhaenys travels north with the king’s following. She’s too risky a hostage to be left behind, especially when the realm is Handless. Rumors say he’ll name his foster brother Eddard Stark Hand. Lord Stark, the brother of the Lady Lyanna her father stole.

She grieves for Lord Arryn. It almost surprises her-- he was distant to her, but not unkind. She remembers his anxious wife Lysa Tully Arryn, and his weak son Robert, who had been named for the king. (Robert, she thinks, had been useful to her as she faked illnesses.) Robert, she thinks, is Lord of the Eyrie now, Defender of the Vale, and Warden of the East-- or at least until she hears Ser Jaime Lannister the Kingslayer is Warden of the East in Lord Robert Arryn’s place, and Lady Lysa had taken her son to the Vale.

Like the royal family, she sleeps in the holdfasts they pass, or camps out on the ground. She’s watched carefully, especially as they pass through the Riverlands and through the Targaryen loyalist houses-- Darry, Ryger, Mooton, and Goodbrook. Rhaenys is given a personal guard of Lannister men, Baratheon men, and Ser Jaime Lannister the Kingslayer. Only the king and queen have more men on them.

After two months of traveling-- of Rhaenys riding surrounded by Robert’s men, of finally being able to talk to the princess Myrcella without being slapped away-- they finally reach the North. And there is snow!

With a laugh, Rhaenys falls off her horse, packs a snowball, and throws it at-- she’s marked her target carefully, and he’s a travelling singer, one who she can pose no threat to. He’s an older man, too, and a commoner, so he can pose no threat to King Robert. Within minutes, a snow fight breaks out, and Rhaenys, for one of the few times in her life, can play with the children. She defends the younger prince and princess, she laughs until her eyes water. Finally, it’s over. Let King Robert storm at her, let him yell-- it does not matter because she enjoyed herself.

* * *

 

As she sleeps, someone claps a hand over her mouth, and Rhaenys wakes with a start. Is this it? Will she die here? She tries to scream, but her voice is muffled. Her eyes focus, and it’s a man. “Be quiet,” he says in a harsh whisper. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

 _Someone else said that once_ , some phantom memory says.

“I have something for you,” the man in her memory and the man in front of her say.

 _No,_ she wants to say. _No, I don’t want it, stop, let me go, let me go--_ But Rhaenys Nymeros Targaryen is a princess born and bred in dreary Dragonstone, a lady and a hostage raised in the Red Keep. She can no more be rude, be insulting, than she can pull out her tongue.

 _Come with me,_ the man in her memory says, _and you might live._

“Here,” the man in front of her says, before Rhaenys can say a word. “It’s a book. From the Citadel. Alleras-- he’s a novice and he gave me two gold dragons to bring it to you. He said that you’d asked him for it, and it was changed especially for you.”

Rhaenys takes it mutely. Alleras, Alleras-- who was he? Why would she be interested? The man makes an awkward bow, and slips into the night.

* * *

After another week or two or three of traveling, they reach Winterfell.

The King swings off his horse, and embraces who she assumes to be Lord Stark with a shout. They talk, exchanging what Rhaenys thinks-- hopes-- to be greetings. The queen and her children are introduced to the Starks of Winterfell, who are a pretty family. A tall smiling youth is the other hostage-- the heir to Pyke and the Iron Islands, Theon Greyjoy. Rhaenys smiles at him-- surely he, more than Varys, would understand her more. He responds with a slower smile as he looks her up and down, the smile like Nymeria’s. She likes Lady Nym’s better, she decides.

Lord Robb (conceived on the marriage night of when her family’s enemies allied and warred against them)  has his mother Lady Catelyn Tully Stark’s look, but there’s something of the North in him, she thinks, something hard and stubborn. Lady Sansa is as pretty as her lady mother, Lady Arya messy-haired with a bright smile, Lord Brandon (named for his uncle her grandfather murdered, no doubt) cheerful, the young Lord Rickon a mere babe, no older than Rhaenys had been when she was taken to the Red Keep and kept there. The bastard Jon Snow has his father’s look, with not much of his mother’s. Possibly a Riverlander, or a Dornish girl, she thinks. She wonders if he knows his mother. Even Rhaenys has heard how Lord Eddard Stark’s honor is undoubtable. Theon is perhaps a year or two older, and the closest to her age. Lord Robb and Jon Snow are three or four years her junior, and she cannot talk with the Lord Robb. Even though his father is the king’s closest friend, she’d be attracting undue attention.

* * *

 

Theon is the one to escort her to dinner. They enter the hall after little Rickon, and Greyjoy makes her laugh with quick, clever japes about the frozen North, and the joys of being a hostage, or Myrcella’s fat septa. She’s surprised she’s escorted and seated at the dias with the trueborn Starks. She’s still given the lowest seat of honor there, at the very end of the table, as far away from King Robert as possible.

She’s given as much freedom in the curiously warm Winterfell as she has in the Red Keep, likely because Eddard Stark is the king’s dearest friend, and his household’s loyalty is undoubtable. She flirts a bit with Theon. He’s handsome, slender, dark of hair and eye, a hostage for ten years, and as much an outsider in the North as she is. “Tell me,” she says, leaning forward. “What do the Ironborn say?”

Theon gives a shrug. “The priests of the Drowned God say ‘What is dead may never die’, but I have found that’s often not the play. Do you wish to move to the islands? They are cold and rocky, no place for a lovely maiden such as you.”

Surely that was what Uncle Oberyn meant, but she didn’t understand why he would say that. Perhaps he meant that when they broke her spirit, she would be impossible to break more. Yes, she decides. When Prince Joffrey takes the Iron Throne, she would already be cowed by his father so that he could not harm her.

But now she must turn his mind away. He’s a callow youth, and she’s practice flirting with potboys and even Lancel Lannister to know how this is. She’s no blushing innocent-- she’s exchanged enough kisses with boys (and one rather lovely maidservant), to know how to lid her eyes and say: “You assume much, Ser Theon.”

“I’m no Ser, my lady Rhaenys. The Iron Islands and the North has no knights-- we worship different gods than your Seven.”

 _She has him._ “My apologies, my lord Theon. After all, if I am to be a lady, you are a lord. Has not the lady Sansa taught you Monsters and Maidens? Or perhaps Come-into-my-castle? I fear I have found no monster, so I can be no maiden.”

But no, she didn’t have him, and Theon’s eyes darken. “I’m a hostage, my lady Rhaenys.” His tone is careful, as she’s taught hers to be. “I’m no Stark. I’m a Greyjoy of the Iron Islands, and I was half grown when I came to Winterfell. Sansa Stark has played few childhood games with me.”

This was not the way to hoped to distract him-- she’d hoped for a few boring kisses until a convenient excuse to leave and avoid him for the rest of the trip North. He was to eventually be Lord of the Iron Islands, so she could not be with him-- and what would happened when he found her sewn? She’d heard his reputation from a few kitchen girls. A few minutes with him, and his hand would under her dress. So be it, she’d decided. But that would not be the case, not now.

Mayhaps she could still be a friend. The heir to the Iron Islands could be useful. They were small and bleak, full of reavers and rapers, reckless and wild, but Theon could help her when Joffrey sat the Throne. Joff was cruel and short-sighted-- mayhaps he’d see something funny in giving her to a Great House of a few scattered rocks when her family used to rule the Seven Kingdoms.

“Theon,” she says, putting a hand on his arm, “I’m no Baratheon nor Lannister. I’m a hostage as well-- but you’ll likely be released if you do some great service of valour, or when your lord father dies. I have heard Lord Eddard Stark is--”

“Honorable,” he says, his voice like a whip, the single word sounding filthy in his mouth. “Cold and honorable. He’s got a bastard, did you see that? Snow, his name is. Jon Snow. The most honorable man in the Seven Kingdoms got a bastard on some peasant and refuses to speak of her, took the boy and brought him here, in front of his wife and trueborn children. The _bastard_ has a higher place in the family than I do.”

Rhaenys could almost sympathize. King Robert had many bastards, but he never brought them in. Almost, almost. Theon hadn’t been castrated, wasn’t Rhaegar Targaryen's child. Theon was only the child of a rebel lord that had been forgiven. Theon would rule the Iron Islands one day. Once King Robert died, Rhaenys would be lucky to be a Silent Sister-- if she was allowed to live, and her cousins would weep over her body. She was sure Theon didn’t pray that his father’s murderer who hated him would have a long and healthy life. She was sure Theon didn’t poison himself to be ill, was sure Theon could stand to do more than pick at his food.

“You are your father’s hostage. I’m the hostage for new rebels and for the Beggar Prince and his sister. You fear the actions of one man. I fear the actions of thousands.” Rhaenys took a breath. “I am sorry, my lord Theon. That was not. . .that was not _proper.”_ It was the most angry she’d ever gotten so far with someone not a maid, so tightly she reigned in her temper.

He gives a bitter smile. Rhaenys feels a kinship surge in her. Surely this was attraction, surely what it felt like to be with someone you fancied. She tilts her head, and he covers her mouth with his.

It is not as lovely as she thought it would be. It’s just the same as it was with the potboys, though Theon is more skilled. Theon, she can tell, is enjoying it, but all Rhaenys feels is distant. Unbidden, her cousin Nymeria blooms in her head. Theon was beardless, clean-shaven, and she could pretend he was Nym--

She breaks away, breathing heavily. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

His eyes travel down her form, then up to her face. “Can’t?”

 _No,_ she wants to say. _I’ll do it, please don’t be mad_.

He must have read something-- one hostage to another, and he gives a sigh. “Pity. Your lips were made for kissing.”

Rhaenys almost corrects him-- her uncle had said she had thin lips. “You’re not so awful yourself, Lord Theon.” She holds out her hand, hoping to diffuse the situation. “Friends?” It’s dangerous, she knows, she could be dragged out for treason, for starting a rebellion but--

Theon ignores the hand, ignores her and left. Rhaenys looks back to see if her guard had noticed, and sees him with a serving girl. She shakes her head, smiling. She knows better than to taste freedom-- to leave would incite a tighter guard. She feels her hair in her braid and finds it messed-- Theon had tangled his hands in it, it seemed. She unfastens it, lets her hair fall free in waves. This was her mother’s hair, she thinks. _My mother held my hair._

The bastard finds her then, her fingers clenching her hair as if she’s trying to rip her mother’s memory out of them. She sees how he must see her-- kiss-swollen lips, loose hair, flushed skin. She meets his gaze defiantly, with a courage she would not be able to give to his trueborn brother. He’s half a boy still, drunk for what she suspects might be a first time, and almost pretty. The sounds of her watcher and his woman are loud. Rhaenys refuses to color at their moans. Though a maid, she’s eight-and-ten, a woman grown and flowered, living in the Red Keep ruled by Robert Baratheon, and the daughter of a mad rapist.  

“Jon Snow,” she says, wanting for companionship. “Sit by me, will you?”

He does so, though he takes care to sit as far apart as he can on the bench. “As my lady says.” He addresses it to her lap rather than her face. At least he didn’t address it to her breasts, she reflects.

“Did you enjoy the dinner? I saw you feeding your wolf.” The wolf is at his heels now, white and silent.

“Ghost,” the boy says. “His name is Ghost, and he’s a direwolf.”

“That’s clever,” Rhaenys responds. “Is he sweet?” No, he’s a direwolf-- the mead must have made her head work slowly. “A white direwolf? Isn’t that the sigil of your House?”

“I’m a Snow, not a Stark, my lady. House Stark’s sigil is a gray direwolf on an ice-white field.”

Rhaenys flushes. It used to be she had a head for sigils, but now all she can remember are the words. “Winter is coming, isn’t it? All wolves will be made white by snow. Will you be joining us in King’s Landing?”

He’d be welcome, she thinks. Eddard Stark’s bastard could pose no threat to the peace of the realm, especially with Eddard Stark as King’s Hand. The queen would not like a bastard in court, but she suffered Mylenda whatever-name-she-used-now, and Jon Snow could pose even less threat to her children than he could to Lady Catelyn Stark’s. He could be her friend, a true friend, the truest she’s had. Mayhaps she’d be given to Lord Stark’s bastard-- Prince Joffrey would like that even more, wedding a Targaryen to a motherless bastard--

“I am joining the Night’s Watch,” he states, all cocksure arrogance and youthful brazenness. Or not-- perhaps she’s drunk and sees confidence where there is none. Perhaps it’s a cover. Rhaenys’s hopes, which had been almost high, drop. “I’m going to defend the Wall.”

“A noble calling,” Rhaenys says politely. She couldn’t imagine it-- a thousand-foot wall of ice, all cold. The Starks have winter in their bones, she’d heard. Perhaps these Northern houses are all the same.

“You can touch Ghost if you like. He won’t bite, not if I’m with him. I saw you looking.”

She gives a laugh. “You’re right, Jon Snow. Forgive me, I’m drunk.” She holds her hand, slightly scared that the wolf will snap, but all it does is sniff her hand warily and give a small lick before pulling back. “He doesn’t like the south!” For some reason, she finds that funny-- she’s from King’s Landing and her mother was from Dorne and these beasts are from north of the Wall, so they’ve probably not smelled a thing like her before! She wonders if he smells what clings to her skin at times, it seems, the smell she cannot escape--

Jon Snow colors, red high on his face. It was funny. Were she a few years younger, she’d kiss him to see what he’d do. “Ghost has never met you before, my lady. He does not know what to think.”

“Of course,” Rhaenys lowers her head. “Once a cook gave me a spun-sugar dragon. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I remember thinking she was kind to me before, and thinking she was the best lady in the world, that things would go back to how they would be? Isn’t it funny? A sugar _dragon_ , and I thought all would be well. People would be nice to me again.” She knows her words  would be found out, and she had a tight enough control on her tongue to not say anything that sounds like she hates the Baratheons and Lannisters. “I loved her so much for that that my heart hurt. Proudly I ate the wings, then carried it to my nursemaid, because I--” _didn’t know not to._ No, she couldn’t say that. “Because I thought it was beautiful. She spanked me until I was screaming, and I never saw the cook again.”

She’d forgotten that. The dismissed cook, the spun dragon, the beating.

“My lady, I--”

“No, you heard nothing.” Her traitorous tongue. How could she make him forget that? “I had a cat once.” The name _Balerion_ rises up in her bones, the name of her ancestor’s dragon. “He was black. I used to think if I held him tight enough, nothing bad would happen. But then I would see my grandfather, and I would know that wasn’t true. I held onto my cat one night, but he didn’t save me.” She forgot that. She forgot clutching him so tightly to her that he left scratches on her arms. She hid under Papa’s bed because Mama always found her there and would lift her up and kiss her face, and Papa would play her song and call them the suns of his life. “But when I came back, he wasn’t there. I have always wondered, where did he go? Why didn’t I like cats anymore?”

“You remember--”

“I remember _nothing._ ” Her voice snaps like a whip, and it draws the guard's attention. “My head hurts, that’s all. Escort me back to my room, ser.”

He pulls on his clothes, straightening them out. If he is ashamed or made anxious in his failure to watch Rhaenys, he gives no sign of it. “Was Stark’s bastard bothering you?”

She can say yes, she thinks. It will keep him silent. But-- “No,” she says. “He was not. Lord Stark’s natural son was a credit to his father’s name. He was as honorable as they say his father is.” Perhaps he will think kindly of her. Perhaps that will convince him Rhaenys is drunk and the things she said were a child’s fancies. _Black, black all around her, water dripping and something near her, the darkness swallowing up her screams, something making a scary noise near her._ “No,” she repeats. This is the drunkest she’s ever gotten, she thinks with a clouded head.

* * *

She is escorted back to her room, and sleeps in that day. She wakes with a pounding ache in her head, and the ever-tantalizing feel of something beyond reach. _This is my penance_ , she tells herself as her head hurts more. _If my tongue is that loose again, then this is the least of what I will receive._

She spends lunch in the library, reading books of the body, what lies under the skin. She reads songs of war and violence. She finally opens the book given to her the night on the journey to Winterfell. The first and last fifteen pages are a history of the Dance of the Dragon, and every other page is about what lies under the skin of a man.

Rhaenys inhales sharply. _This is a book to teach her to kill._ She knows who Alleras is now. Alleras is her ally at the citadel, some catspaw of her uncle Oberyn’s. Oberyn taught and raised his daughters as to the spear and the knife and poison, and Oberyn is giving her a lesson on how to fake her illnesses and where to pinch and where to cut those who would hurt her. This was a book that must have taken a long time-- a year, at the least.

She ignores Theon Greyjoy as they sup together, breaking her fast on bread and soup. He’s all too content to ignore her as she picks at her food. It sits heavy in her stomach as it always does, but she needs to have some food for guest right. But she knows how to help herself now, so she does not have to worry about one man, because if she can get a knife during an attack, she knows where to shove it up in him.

 

Brandon Stark falls two weeks later.


	7. after (again)

Rhaenys isn’t able to visit him-- he is second-in-line for Winterfell, and Robert claims she’d be a danger, that she’d kill him. Rhaenys bows her head, and prays in the sept for Brandon’s recovery with the rest of the queen’s household.

“Uncle Tyrion says Bran’s going to live,” Princess Myrcella tells Rhaenys and Prince Tommen a few days later. “And Maester Luwin said he might wake, too.”

“Did he?” Rhaenys doubts the last one. “He fell long and hard, my princess. He broke his back and shattered his legs.” The more scurrilous rumors say more than _that_ is broken, that he’s broken every bone in his body, especially the parts without bones. Her book says that men who break their backs are cripples, and are better off dead.

“Maester Luwin said he wouldn’t _die_ ,” Myrcella responds, confidence fading. “Uncle Tyrion said the maester hopes, so there must be a chance.”

Rhaenys smiles, because Myrcella wants her to. Rhaenys has no hatred for the young Stark, but if Rhaenys had fallen, she’d already be dead now, and the Baratheons would stage a feast. Few but the Martells mourned for her brother, while the still-living Brandon Stark is mourned by family, servants, and the royal family. “Let us pray the good Maester Luwin is right. Brandon will wake up, and he’ll come to King’s Landing, and he’ll say ‘Princess Myrcella, your wishes healed me!’”

The princess colors prettily, and Prince Tommen laughs. “And he’ll teach me how to use the sword like he did! And we’ll find the castle cats and never eat beets!”

Rhaenys feels her heart swell in something almost like love for them. Those two are sweet as their brother is not, and she wants nothing more than to clutch them to herself, muss Tommen’s hair, and kiss Myrcella’s head, but she can’t, even if they fling themselves into her arms. (She knows they know better, though. Cersei pours poison into their ears, and Robert’s hate is overwhelming. It won’t be too long until they look at her with their eyes full of Baratheon hatred and Lannister disgust)

* * *

They leave soon after, and Rhaenys is glad. It’s cold up North, and she sticks out like the outsider she is. She’s cold easily, and she is safer in the South. Her skin will fade in this Northern weather, and she will be paler than Elia ever was, even after her mother wed the dragons.

She imagines what it would be like-- to have a dragon between her legs, muscles bunching,  as her dragonriding ancestors have felt. The beat of wings, the wind tearing at her face, the heat and scale of her dragon’s back. She wonders if her grandmothers felt the dragon’s heart beating with each wing stroke, if--

A fantasy stole into her head, Rhaenys riding astride a brown-and-brass dragon, Lady Nymeria with her arms around Rhaenys’s waist, Rhaenys’s loose hair tangling around Nym’s smooth braid-- _Enough_. She was a hostage, her father born of an ungodly and unholy incest twice over-- must she be breaking half the laws of the Seven? Nymeria was another woman, and her own cousin to boot. True, Lord Tywin had married the Lady Johanna who had been his cousin, but that was uncommon. He had been the heir to the richest kingdom in Westeros, and Rhaenys was only the granddaughter of a deposed tyrant.

She clutches the book to her chest. The dragons are dead, and only three Targaryens live-- one of them broken, one a beggar, and the other a young girl. Rhaenys, Viserys, and Daenaera-- how the gods must laugh at them, they who were once so mighty and thought themselves gods, reduced to a craven woman with unnatural cravings, a child, and a man mocked by everyone. Three Targaryens wove the realm together, and the realm will see three Targaryens fall.

* * *

She is being watched more.

She can tell, the way that when she leaves to make water, that the the distance between her and her guard is smaller than usual. She isn’t allowed near the children anymore-- Baratheon or Stark, it makes no difference. The Starks ride with direwolves, and yet _she_ is the dangerous one.

She doesn’t ask why. Perhaps they knew of her talks with Jon Snow, or they heard she kissed Theon Greyjoy. It is a precaution, she tells herself. It is wise; she’d do the same if she had to watch people. Or would she?

She dreams of dragons at night, dragons fighting and dancing and swooping and clawing at each other at night. The dragons spit fire, and Rhaenys is engulfed, as she twists --be it agony or ecstasy, she cannot say-- in the flames.

Her watch is lessened a month later, when Lady Arya attacks Prince Joffrey and runs away. After all, Rhaenys has spent the last fifteen years under their eye, and the most she has done is kiss a few people, the most important the heir to salt  and shit and rocks. This is the Hand’s daughter who assaulted the heir to the Seven Kingdoms, the grandson of Lord Tywin Lannister.

When Lady Arya is found, Rhaenys is among the people pulled from bed to witness. To see the King’s Justice done again, she supposes. The girl makes her think of Rhaenys's distant aunt Lady Baela the Burnt, her newest hero. Some of the shine she places on the younger girl is quickly taken off as she begins hitting Lady Sansa.

Rhaenys understands, because of course she does. If you are to marry the prince, you must be on his side. But you cannot lie to the king. You also cannot turn on your family if they are not traitors or Targaryens. Lady Arya doesn’t understand, and Rhaenys would have at her age. Then again, Lady Arya couldn’t have understood, because she didn’t grow up a hostage.

“ _We have a wolf_ ,” the queen says, and Rhaenys remembers why she fears the queen more than she fears the king.

Lord Stark says a few words, and then says he will kill the wolf-- the _wrong wolf--_ himself. Rhaenys hisses in an intake of breath. What sort of man would be so cold-hearted to-- no, she can’t think that. Lord Stark is kind to let her be as she was. She ought not question his decisions, for he is surely wiser than she is.

  
The ride south after that, is far more tense than it had been previously. When they finally arrive back at King’s Landing, Rhaenys is almost comforted to see her prison. There is her small room, there is her bed, that is her mirror and washstand, those are her clothes hanging, that is her locked box of jewelry, that is the hanging on her wall. True, she will be watched more, and Lord Varys’s eyes and ears are everywhere, and she cannot leave the castle, nor can she hide, but this is a familiar cage, one that she knows.

After all, this well-known cage is her home. She no longer can imagine not living in the small cage of a hostage.


	8. Black cells

As she practices her sewing a moon later, she’s seized by men. Her first thought is _They know about what I did and said in Winterfell._ The second comes with more dread. _The Beggar Prince has made a move. Viserys and Daenaera have damned me._ It must be that one, for if she was being punished for her own actions, they would have taken her sooner. And it wouldn’t be the realm helping her-- they washed their hands of the Targaryens when her sire died on the Trident. Dorne is too small to raise, even for Elia’s daughter.

She doesn’t fight them. She is Lady Rhaenys, of the line of Nymeria, of lines of princes and princesses and kings and queens and _dragonriders_. She struggles only briefly, when she’s first grabbed by the arms and dragged to her feet. They have not even sent Kingsguard to take her, as is her. . .right? Due? What she is entitled to? They have sent household men, which must be good. She will simply plead her case before the king again, perhaps go chained for a week or so, and live under more watchful eyes, and--

They aren’t heading towards the Iron Throne. Nor to where the Small Council meets. Rhaenys swallows. If she is not heading towards halls Great or Small, or the council chambers, then. . .then. . . .

 _Viserys must have raised banners,_ then _No, he must have found an ally._ It has come to this, fifteen years of hiding and making herself as small as she could be, and she is to be killed, and her head stuck on a spike on the parapet, and it is all over, because her uncle has killed her. She weeps as she laughs. There will be no dragon for her, no rides with the Lady Nymeria, no meetings with Uncle Oberyn, no seeing Dorne--

She screams then, clawing at her captors, wishing she had a dragon like her ancestors so it could screech and defend her, help her, please someone _help her!_ She repeats her desperate claims-- she’s done nothing wrong, she’s a good and loyal servant, she’ll do anything, just let her be, let her go--

She is ignored. By the lords and sers and ladies who watch her-- if they look at her, they turn away.

They lead her down to the dungeons, past the first, level, past the second level-- the third level, they’re sending her to the Black cells! The Black cells, she can’t be there, it’s dark and cold and cramped--

They shove her in a cell that is black, near as black as the last--

“Let me out!” Rhaneys cries. “Let me out, free me--” the door closes, and Rhaenys screams. It’s dark and cold, and there is straw-- no, her feet are damp, they always were, and she leaps for the ceiling because that’s where the door is, it’s above her-- no, to the side-- she can’t breathe,  and it’s dark, she can’t see her own hands, and it’s stone, stone like the caverns, she’s in there again, with the damp stone and the lion’s howls and--

She lets out another scream. “Please, please, please! Kill me, just do it, please, just kill me and take me out of here!”

She can move around, this cell is long enough for a tall man to lie down-- no, it’s small and cramped, she can’t spread her legs out. The door is high above her head, it’s black, pure shapeless and formless black-- Rhaenys is four again, in rags with a ragged blanket and she has to-- no, she’s a woman grown and flowered,  that was fourteen years ago, there are no monsters here, no beasts--

She claps her hands over her ears _(to block out the hungry slap of waves)_ and kneels down. “Rhaenys,” she whispers. “Rhaenys, Rhaenys, Rhaenys, _Rhaenys. . ._ ”

It was a game she played to calm herself. _Ae_ gon and Vi _sen_ ya and _Rhae_ nys and Ba _ler_ ion and _Vhae_ gar and _Mer_ axes. _Ae_ nys and A _lyss_ a and _Mae_ gor and Ja _hae_ rys and Aly _sanne_ and _Quick_ silver and Ba _ler_ ion and Ver _mith_ or and _Sil_ verwing. Vi _serys_ and Rhae _ny_ ra and Ae _gon_ and _Ae_ gon and Ba _ler_ ion and _Sy_ rax and _Sun_ fyre and _Storm_ cloud. A singsong, to help her remember the names of the kings. She had ones for the sigils of houses too, she remembers, but it won't come to her tongue.

And she sings.

She sings until her voice cracks and her throat is hoarse and burning. She sings to hear her voice, to hear something other than the waves and roars in her head, to remind herself that she is older now, that she is not in a hole so small that she can’t lie down, that she is not in a rock well in Casterly Rock.

She sings the version of the Dornishman’s Wife that came out one time. Did her mother sing it to her? She doesn’t know. She sings the Mother’s Hymm, Brave Danny Flint, On a Misty Morn, all the songs of the Seven she knows. She wasn’t taught to singing, nor to play instruments, so she will never be a singer, but Rhaenys needs this, to hear her voice in something other than a scream. _If I stop singing in the dark, I will be back in my hole._

She is given burnt bread and some queer-tasting water thrice a day. For once, Rhaenys doesn’t pick at it. She devours the bread, stomach growling and begging for more. She pounds against the walls when her throat hurts too much to sing, back in her past, hearing the lions and the water and the rats.

She continues her Targaryen chant, with half-remembered princes and princesses and kings and queens. _Rhae_ nys and _Lae_ na and _Lae_ nor and _Bae_ la and _Rhae_ na. _Mel_ eys and _Vha_ gar and _Sea_ smoke and _Moon_ dancer and _Morn_ ing. When she reaches the Blackfyre uprising-- the first, she thinks it was, she’s a better head for names than times-- she sings all the names loud and proud, louder than she sang for herself.

* * *

She doesn’t know time. She doesn’t care. She sleeps and wakes and screams and sings and claws her hands bloody on the stones and cries and pleads, occasionally shitting, pissing, and eating.

She dreams as she sleeps, dreams of the brown-and-brass dragon she had dreamt of on the Kingsroad. Rhaenys walks up to her dragon, mounts her, and they fly over the city, but not before her dragon, no, before _she_ opens her jaws and lets out hot orange flame that dances with red and gold in the colors of the Martells and burns down the Red Keep and Maegor’s Holdfast. No, she’s not the dragon, she’s riding the dragon again, and she wheels her mount North, and they fly until they reach Dorne and there her uncle is but he’s Nymeria and she is dressed in red and black and wears a crown.

* * *

When Rhaenys wakes after what feels like almost a lifetime, she is greeted by the King’s Hand. She squints in the bright light, suddenly aware of how dirty she must be. _My lord_ , she wants to say, only the words won’t come out. A half-memory springs into her head-- someone carries her up as Rhaenys tries to fight him.

“Do you know why you’re here?” His question is kindly meant, but Rhaenys hears only scorn. She shakes her head, shielding her eyes from his light.

“Your uncle Viserys some months ago sold his sister Daenerys to a Dothraki _khal_.”

Had she been in there for months? Rhaenys can’t remember how many days she’s been in the dark, how long ago she’d been thrown into the Black cells. Surely it had not been more than one moon, she was sure. _Daenerys, her name is Daenerys. She was named for my grandmother, who was named for her mother Naerys and for Daenaera._

“When King Robert learned your aunt Daenerys was pregnant, he grew wroth. He ordered you to be arrested, and put in the cells. I am sorry, my lady. I tried to protest your innocence, but he would not listen. He has given his permission to now release you-- though he said he would not be the one to do it.”

Her throat is dry. Is she not going to be executed? Viserys found an ally by selling his sister to buy an army, and now they can invade.

Lord Stark seems to read her face. “The Dothraki fear the sea, my lady. We have nothing to fear until then-- and not even Dorne would be eager to have Dothraki for allies. Even so, Dothraki are undisciplined and independent-- much like well-armed wildlings, and ten Westerosi trained men can put twenty to rest.”

So why is she here, if Viserys has brought a paper army, a shadow army that will lose? She tries to speak, but fear has stolen her tongue again, locked up her mouth. No, she realizes. It is not the threat of an army, it is the bloodline continuing. Even if Viserys never comes to Westeros to marry her, it was thought she could be used as a pawn to split the Targaryens should Viserys wed her sister, the lords claiming that Rhaenys had the better claim, even though she swore never to use it. They would divide the Targaryen allies, if they had any help of those who were not savages. Viserys has shown he was clever enough to use his sister’s maidenhead to buy an army, and as good as announced that when he came to Westeros, he would marry her. Or perhaps worse now, the Baratheons now have two Targaryen lines to fear-- Viserys’s seed and the Dothraki Targaryens, as well as Rhaenys herself.

“You should not be on this level,” he said with perhaps a hint of shame and guilt, this cold-eyed lord who killed his cherished daughter’s beloved pet. “But these cells you have put in. I mean to see you returned safely to your chamber, Rhaenys Targaryen.”

He’d used her name, her name, her name that she’d never heard from lips other than hers. Her true name-- _Nymeros Targaryen_ was a courtesy to her lady mother, a way of reminding Dorne she was their blood that they held hostage. She flinches back, wanting to scramble back into the dark, away from his stone eyes.

“Will you speak, my lady?”

She swallows, tries to move her lips. She remembers the maesters teaching her her voice, teaching a near-feral child to hide and to speak. “Rhaenys,” she says at last, her voice hoarse from singing and screaming and silence. “I am no lady, my lord.” She’s doing well now.  She can talk again, and this is right. Perhaps her words will be locked up again when she sees the king or the men who put her here, but she can talk to the Northerner. _No,_ she thinks. _This is not the same as when my words were lost. This was pure fear._

She remembers Princess Arianne’s air, Lady Nym’s straight-backed posture, Lady Tyene’s self-confidence. She pushes herself up, and staggers for half-a-minute, lightheaded and dizzy. She remembers two years ago, walking before the court in chains, proud as a princess. “I’m no lady,” she repeats. “I’m Rhaenys Targaryen, of the line of Princess Nymeria the Warrior Queen. I’m Rhaenys, with no title. It’s never brought me joy to have one, my lord.”

“Lady Rhaenys,” Lord Stark says softly, “Princess Elia’s daughter has a title in her own right.”

 _Princess Elia’s daughter stopped being a princess when she was locked up for a year as a toddling child_ , Rhaenys thinks. _Princess Elia’s daughter stopped being a lady when she let servants lock her in chains  to humble herself before the eyes of a king._ “As you say, my lord.”

She half-expected him to hold out his arm for hers, but she sees he has his hand on a cane, and a leg with a limp. Rhaenys averts her eyes, taking care not to stare.

“The gaoler said you screamed your aunt’s name, as if you were pleading with or for her.” His tone is careful and holds no accusation as they leave the darkness.

Rhaenys flinches at the light, near-shutting her eyes. “I was remembering my ancestors. Princess Daenerys Martell, who brought peace to Dorne.” _The singers say Daemon Blackfyre rose in rebellion when denied her._

“It’s a dangerous name to say, my lady. To speak of King Aerys’ surviving children is to invite Lord Varys’s ears.”

 _Viserys held my hand._ “I thought her name was Daenaera, my lord Hand. The Dragonbane’s wife, the Broken king’s love.” _Mother of  the Young Dragon, the Beloved and Blessed, and the Defiant._  “Pardon me, my lord. I did not know.”

“You were never told?” He seems puzzled for a moment, Rhaenys thinks. “Daenaera or Daenerys or Daena or Naerys-- it is not wise to go sprouting those names. Nor safe, especially for you.”

“I never knew, my lord. I learned about Aegon the Unworthy and the First Blackfyre Rebellion, but no rulers or their children, though I learned about Aerion Brightfire. He drank wildfire to make himself a dragon, and died.” _They wanted me to know the monsters. All of them were monsters._

“So he did,” Lord Stark says. His tone is solemn.

 _He’s japing_ , she thinks. She hopes. “My lord Hand, I would not even light a candle with it if I needed the light.” She could _smell--_ no, there is nothing, nothing, _nothing._ It is a Targaryen madness, nothing more.

She can’t read his face. He winces every few steps, and Rhaenys worriedly looks at the men surrounding them, but they barely flinch. “They know it is my leg, and not you, my lady.”

“Why are you so kind to me, Lord Stark?” The question bursts out, and Rhaenys wishes she could take it back. _Time in a cell, and my tongue is as loose as it’s ever been_. “The Mad King killed your father and brother. His heir kidnapped your sister.” _Worse and worse._

“You were young when that happened. You had no part other than holding your mother’s skirts. You are barely older than my son Robb. You are a woman grown, and you keep the oath you swore.”

Rhaenys warms. Mayhaps it’s because she needs to please people, mayhaps it’s because Lord Stark is not. . . cold? Mayhaps it makes her feel better towards this ice-eyed man. “I swore by all the gods I knew of. King Robert was kind to let me live, and in the Red Keep. It was the least I could do, to not trouble his line.” The words come by rote.

“Lady Stark,” Lord Stark says gently, “I mean to see you treated well. Perhaps in a year or three, we can see you married to some man of proven loyalty, or returned to Dorne, under the care of Prince Doran. Or if you wish, you can go to the Faith as a septa or silent sister.”

“I thank you,” Rhaenys responds, meaning it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tbh, at the end of this story, Rhaenys was supposed to commit suicide.  
> After last night, though-- I can't. I can't do it, can't kill off someone /they'd/ hate. I'm in the middle of re-writing the ending, but the next installment of this story will be not as flowing, story-line wise, more choppy and just snippets of scenes far apart. (save for maybe the first one/two/three chapters)
> 
> To anyone reading this, I'm here for you, if you need support after this election. YOU are special. You are amazing. You are spectacular.


	9. gwenys

When she reaches her room, she finds she has a roommate.

A maid with brown hair, a face full of freckles, and brown eyes smiles up from Rhaenys’s bed. “Lord Stark called for me to be your companion, Lady Rhaenys,” she says cheerfully. “I have the privilege to be Gwenys of House Mallory.”

“My pleasure,” Rhaenys says weakly.

“Do you need rest, my lady?” The girl asks. “I’m to be your companion in all things. Lord Stark thought it be good you have a friend.”

 _Friend._ Lancel Lannister wanted to be her friend, and still sends her messages, which Rhaenys burns. Rhaenys offered the hand of friendship to Theon Greyjoy, and he spurned it. Rhaenys might have been friends with Jon Snow, but he went to the Wall. Gwenys Mallory, she knows, would be only another pair of ears for Varys, another set of eyes for the Lannisters, another informant to the king, a spy for Lord Stark.

But Rhaenys is tired and sore and ready to sleep. “You may undress me,” she says, wishing she didn’t sound as exhausted as she looks. Gwenys hesitates for a moment, and Rhaenys makes the decision to be kind to her. Had Gwenys jumped into it, Rhaenys would know Gwenys was overeager to listen to her, and had another motive and another master.

Gwenys says nothing as she undressed Rhaenys, though when she moves to wrap a sleeping robe around her she finds her voice. “Should I call for the maids to draw you a bath, my lady Rhaenys?” Gwenys is too highborn and well-trained to say Rhaenys stinks, or mention how dirty and bruised she is, and for that Rhaenys is grateful.

“No,” Rhaenys says. “I need to sleep more than I need to bathe.”

Gwenys says nothing, but as she ties up the strings on Rhaenys’s robes, her hands are more tense. _They were soft before. Soft and sweet._

Rhaenys sleeps, but her dreams are anything but silent. She is a dragon, trapped in the Black cells, with a chained neck and legs and wings and jaws muzzled shut. She roars as much as she can, thrashes about.

Gwenys wakes her. “My lady, my lady!” She shakes her until Rhaenys opens her eyes. “Are you well?” There is pure concern and care in her eyes, worry and fear. “Shall I call for Maester Pycelle?”

 _She is kind as she is beautiful,_ Rhaenys thinks for half a second. “No,” she says quickly. “I often have night terrors. It’s naught to trouble the maesters with.”

Gwenys presses her lips together for a moment, and Rhaenys thinks she’s about to argue, but Gwenys merely sighs, and lies back on Rhaenys’s bed. Rhaenys watches her fall asleep, before she closes her own eyes.

* * *

“My father’s to find and slay The Mountain That Rides,” Gwenys says happily two days later. “The Hand himself sent my father after him.”

“Alone?” Rhaenys asks. It seems a fool’s errand to her.

“No, with Lord Beric Dondarrion and others.” Gwenys seems uncomfortable. “Lord Eddard gave the command to Lord Dondarrion, and didn’t give Ser Loras the command.”

“Ser Loras-- Tyrell? Is Ser Loras going?” A fleet of pretty knights. _The Mountain will kill them all._

“No, can’t you think? My lady. Ser Loras isn’t to go at all, the Hand says. And of course Tyrell-- who else would I be talking about? Ser Loras-- Rosby, or some name?”  Gwenys is in love with Ser Loras. Or thinks she is. Rhaenys has seen Gwenys’s eyes linger slightly on her form as she undresses her. Sometimes Rhaenys thinks of pressing her lips to her companion’s, and of late her stomach has been feeling tight and her breath short--

 _No._ “Ser Gregor is dangerous,” she says carefully. This is Gwenys’s father, after all. But Rhaenys knows how dangerous Ser Gregor can be. She remembers the tourney, of Clegane killing the young knight, killing his own horse, trying to kill Ser Loras and then his own brother the Hound.

“He’s one man,” Gwenys responds. “Freakish big and strong, but the Hand sent twenty men after him, near all knights. Ser Beric’s a Marcher lord, and everyone knows they’re the fiercest knights of the Stormlands or the Reach. _And_ Ser Beric’s to marry a Dayne, the sister of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of Morning. The Mountain wouldn’t be so foolish.”

“Are you in love with Ser Beric too?” Rhaenys teases. “Ser Beric and Ser Loras-- who’s next? Ser Arys? Ser Jaime?”

Gwenys looks stung for a minute, and Rhaenys’s stomach twists. She hadn’t meant to be cruel. She didn’t want to have hurt Gwenys’s feelings. “I’m just the second daughter of-- of uncertain birth, to a minor lord, and you are the king’s ward, but one day I will be wed, and have children. I need to remember that,” Gwenys says at last.

“I apologize,” Rhaenys says. She knows the rest. _My marriage prospects were slim enough already before you._

Gwenys says nothing, but her hand reaches for Rhaenys’s on the bed, a peace offering of sorts.

“Your father will be fine,” Rhaenys says, wrapping her hand around Gwenys’s smaller hand. _Everything about her is small and delicate._ “We’ll pray to the gods and leave offerings at the Mother, Warrior, and Smith. And he’ll come back. Tell me, who else went with him?”

“Ser Beric has the command,” Gwenys says at once, then takes a breath. “My-- my father, and twenty of his men, Ser Gladden Wylde and twenty of his men, and the red priest who waves that sword. The red priest had twenty as well. Lord Beric’s squire-- I think he’s a Dornishman, Lady Rhaenys, but Dornish _boy_ might be accurate-- I saw him as they rode out, and he looks ten. The Hand also sent twenty of his own men, and Ser Marq Piper, Ser Karyl Vance, and Ser Raymun Darry went with them as well. They might have had men with them, I don’t know.”

“They did,” Rhaenys reassures her. “Piper and Darry are lords, they will have taken men of their own. So is Vance. I’m certain there’s more than a hundred men out to capture the Mountain, so they must succeed.”

“They say-- there are rumors, of Ser Gregor, and. . .” Gwenys lowers her eyes.

“I know.” Rhaenys nibbles at her lip. It was a common rumor, and the reason why Rhaenys had always taken care to stay as far away as she could from him. “Mayhaps it even is true. But until then, it is not.”

“He scares me, my lady.” Gwenys looks younger, and it is all Rhaenys wants to do to kiss the tears from her eyes, to comfort her, and--

“He scares me too, Gwenys.” She squeezes Gwenys’s hand lightly. “And I have told you before-- I am only only Rhaenys to you. You don’t want me to call you ‘My lady Gwenys’, do you?” Gwenys might be placed in her household to-- the thought makes her heart clench, but Gwenys is looking at her with those big brown eyes and freckles stark on her pale face, full mouth half-open.

With an effort, she tears her eyes away from Gwenys. “He scares everyone. You’re wise to fear him, Gwenys.”

“Rhaenys,” Gwenys says softly, and Rhaenys think there’s not been a sweeter sound.

* * *

When she wakes in the night, not from a nightmare, it is because she’s rolled against Gwenys and her head is on Gwenys’s shoulder and her chest and stomach are feeling tight, and where she’s sewn up, she is uncomfortable, and _hurts_. It is something she cannot-- _will not_ \-- put a name to, because it was wicked and sinful. Everyone knew the Dornish were wanton and strange and bedded with-- Gwenys with her mouth open as Rhaenys kissed down her body, Gwenys gasping as Rhaenys kissed her between--

She takes a deep shuddering breath, moves back to her pillow as Gwenys moves in her sleep. Sweat slicks her body, and Rhaenys wishes she could pretend it was the air, or the blankets, but she can’t lie to herself that way. _It has been but three days_ , she thinks. _It is far too soon. Even with Lady Nym, I didn’t--_

She licks her lips, and moves as far away from Gwenys on the bed as she can.


	10. too fast, too soon

She avoids Gwenys for the next few days, ignoring the girl’s hurt. Because she is still a girl, even though she is six-and-ten, and a woman flowered. (Is Gwenys still a maiden? Rhaenys decides not to ask.)

Gwenys flirts with the passing noblemen, especially with Jalabhar Xho, who does his best to flatter both of them.

“Your eyes are lovely today,” he says to Rhaenys, and Rhaenys resists the urge to roll them at him. She might be more comfortable than him, but she’s still a hostage, and Jalabhar Xho should know better than to try to beg from a maiden despised by the king.

“Mine are better, aren’t they?” Gwenys asks Jalabhar Xho. “Tell me, my lord. Rhaenys says mine are the prettiest she’s ever seen, like fresh soil.”

“I said no such thing,” Rhaenys protests, her heart pounding her in her chest. Gwenys was _hers_ , not Jalabhar Xho’s. Jalabhar Xho had no right to look at her face, when she heard how the noblemen hated spots on faces. “If I did, I would have said they were remarkably similar in color to the color of _night_ soil.”

Gwenys flinches as if slapped, and her eyes fill with tears. She whirls around, and runs away. Rhaenys feels awful. She ought not have said what she did-- she had said that about Gwenys’s eyes, that they were as warm and dark as new soil,

“That was ill-done,” Jalabhar says, and he walks away as well.

* * *

 Whens Rhaenys catches up to Gwenys, it is as they settle down for bed “I didn’t mean that, Gwenys,” she says desperately. “Truly, Gwenys, you know me, I didn’t mean that. I simply was--”

“Jealous?” Gwenys snaps. “My lady, _you_ can never marry a prince, even a penniless prince in exile. You made fun of me for looking out for a husband of mine own. You’ve the heart of a snake! You want me to be with you all the time, and I have my own prospects to look after, and they’re tarnished me with-- I am the second daughter of a minor House and there have always been doubts about my legitimacy, and I _need_ to marry to live in comfort, especially after _you_. You can live in the court all your days, but I cannot. Or is it that you think that I’m too low-born for a lesser Lannister, or an exiled lord? You, the daughter of--” Her voice is quiet now, but it hurts none the less.

 _I have wounded her deeply._ “No,” Rhaenys says, close to tears. “No, Gwenys, I didn’t mean to say--”

“Then why did you say that?” Gwenys is so beautiful, face red and eyes watery and mouth twisted up--

She doesn’t mean it, she tells herself later. It is nothing, she might think.

But it isn’t. Rhaenys leans forward and kisses Gwenys, and cups her face, and--

It is beautiful. She can taste the salt of Gwenys’s tears but Gwenys is kissing back, Gwenys is pushing them towards Rhaenys’s bed and lying on top of her, Gwenys is unlacing Rhaenys’s robes, Gwenys is kissing Rhaenys’s neck and moving her hands on Rhaenys’s body, and--

Rhaenys breaks away. “No,” she says breathless. “I can’t.” If she thought Gwenys was beautiful before, she is even more so now, lips kiss-swollen and hair messed where Rhaenys has clutched it. The kiss had all the feelings it missed from Theon Greyjoy’s kiss. “No,” Rhaenys says, pulling her robe around her body. “This isn’t right.”

“The Smith fashioned women to enjoy love,” Gwenys responds, unlacing her own dress. “The man I call father had a lady--Lady Deria Wells, of Dorne-- one year, and she told me such urges are the Mother’s signs that women can have a man’s hungers, and that some women are made to lie with each other. The Seven might frown on relations between men or relationships between women, but they hate the kinslayer more, the kingslayer, the incestuous unions, the breaking of guest right, unfaithfulness in marriage. She reminded me frowning is not hate.”

Rhaenys can’t help her eyes-- they are drawn to Gwenys’s nude body. _Is this what is is like, to be Robert?_ “Did she teach you herself?” She finds she’s breathless, her heart pounding fast as images swirl in her mind of where to kiss Gwenys.

“No.” Gwenys takes Rhaenys’s hand and moves it to her freckled breast. Rhaenys can’t hold in the gasp that escapes her mouth. “I learned myself, with my own handmaid.”

“Where is she now?” Rhaenys finds she is not jealous, merely curious, and grateful to this woman who taught Gwenys how to love.

Gwenys rolls over. “She’s married. My handmaid was like me, and beds with men and women alike.”

 _Both?_ Oh. Such a thing was possible? No, she knew that-- the rumors said her uncle Prince Oberyn did the same. But he was Prince of Dorne, and Gwenys the daughter of a minor lord. Which meant her handmaiden must have been of even lower birth-- perhaps a household knight’s daughter or wife, even. Rhaenys sits up. “How did she know to love women was not accused by the Seven?”

Gwenys smiles. “She doesn’t _believe_ in the gods. _Any_ gods. The Seven, the old gods, or the red god of the East. She says if the gods lived, then she would not be in the care of her cousin, the chief undergaoler, for he could talk the ears off a hare.”

He’d seen her, the chief undergaoler.  Rennifer Longwaters, who would boast about having a drop of the dragon from the days of Queen Rhaenyra’s children. He’d seen her, and for all his talk about dragonblood, Longwaters had not even given her a candle.

“I need to rest,” Rhaenys says, hardening to her heart to Gwenys’s face falling.

* * *

 As she sleeps, she has another dragon dream.

A dragon in green-and-silver falls on the ground from a great height. Her brown-and-brass dragon shakes against chains, and the green-and-silver dragon thrashes. _This is what I read from Uncle Oberyn’s book,_ she thinks. _Joffrey died riding Syrax._

But no, he’s not Prince Joffrey Valyrion or Baratheon, he’s a boy without a face, leaking golden blood. The brown dragon weeps fire, until it burns her up, and Rhaenys screams in pain.

“Rhaenys!” Gwenys wakes her again, nude and lovely. For a minute, though their faces and forms are different, Rhaenys think she sees Nymeria, and she feels her stomach tighten.

But then she blinks, and her cousin’s face is Gwenys’s face, big and pale and freckled and concerned. “I dreamed I was afire,” Rhaenys says slowly. “I screamed and I screamed and--” the details of the dream are distancing themself from her head-- there was another dragon, wasn’t there? Was she burned? Or did she start the fire herself?

“Do you need help to sleep again?” Gwenys is already moving onto Rhaenys.

“No!” It bursts out. _There was something with her in the night--_ no, King’s Landing, not Casterly Rock, her bedchamber, not the Black Cells, or her oubliette--

Gwenys draws away. “Have I insulted you, my lady?’

“No.” Rhaenys turns into her pillows, and breathes in the scene of Gwenys. “I need to be alone. You must understand, I--” _This is still new to me._ “I haven’t had a bedmate since the summer inconvenience. And Cyrenna Caron and Mylenda were cruel to me, and I was far younger than them. Cerenna Lannister was closer to my age, but she rightfully thought herself above me. Cerenna was--” was beautiful, Rhaenys remembers, with pale gold hair and pale blue eyes, small and delicate in size. Cerenna had been the cruelest of them, cousin to the Queen and niece of Lord Tywin Lannister.

“Haven’t you ever played kissing games, all the same?” Gwenys is annoyed, Rhaenys can see that.

There was one day when Rhaenys had realized she didn’t truly hate Cerenna Lannister, but had wanted to kiss her--

A new memory slipped into Rhaenys’s mind-- Cerenna Lannister had not been sick that moon she left.

_“Have you ever learned to kiss?” Cerenna asked, sitting on Rhaenys’s bed. Cerenna looks like her queenly cousin, proud and tall and arrogant._

_Rhaenys didn’t understand the feeling in her body, of the sudden excitement and anxiety that sprung up. “No,” she answered honestly._

_“That’s because you’re only a leftover and a hostage,” Cerenna had said, as casually cruel as she almost always was. Cerenna ruled the four of them. Mylenda and Cyrenna Caron were maidens flowered, but Mylenda was bastard-born, and not even the natural daughter of the ruling lord. Cyrenna was the oldest of them all, a second or third cousin to Lord Caron, but near-penniless. The only reason they had silks and velvets and jewels was because Rhaenys’s Martell uncle had to pay for that keep, and that meant gowns and marriages and dowries, so they weren’t tarred by their association with Rhaenys. Cerenna was first cousin to the queen herself, and  the niece of Lord Tywin Lannister through his dead wife Lady Johanna._

_“You’re the first handmaidens I’ve had,” Rhaenys had responded. “The only other girl I see is Princess Myrcella and she’s a baby. I wouldn’t learn to kiss on her.”_

_Cerenna had laughed, that golden tinkling laugh that Rhaenys loved to hear, when it wasn’t directed at her. When Cerenna laughed with her, or at something a knight said, not at her as she so often did. “We’re not your handmaidens, Rhaenys. I’m watching you for my-cousin-the-Queen, you know that. And to civilize you. Your mother was Dornish, and everyone knows they’re wanton and scandalous and uncouth.”_

_“My mother was kind,” Rhaenys had protested then._

_“Your mother was a Martell, and I suppose they’re better because they’re princes and stood against the dragons for two hundred years and even after that Targaryens have taken them to marry. But you’re not a Martell or a Targaryen-- you’re a nameless girl.” Cerenna had laughed again, that wondrous laugh that was ugly again, because Cerenna was trying to make her cry._

_Rhaenys was silent then, looking at her lap._

_“Oh, don’t be stupid!” Cerenna had said, flinging a hand on Rhaenys’s shoulder. “I’m here to help you with that. I’ll teach you how to kiss-- here, part your mouth like this, and lean in--”_

Cerenna had taught her to kiss that time and the next and the next, and they were found by red cloaks. Cerenna had been sent away to Casterly Rock, weeping and claiming it was all Rhaenys’s fault, and Rhaenys had been lectured by septons.

She’d forgotten that. Locked it away in her head.

 _This is Gwenys,_ she tells herself. _She wouldn’t hurt me like Cerenna did._ But suddenly all Rhaenys can see how Gwenys could have deceived her-- how Gwenys all-too-eagerly responded to Rhaenys, how Gwenys always asked her how she felt, how Gwenys mentioned that her father had a Dornishwoman who loved other woman for a paramour one year, that her own handmaiden taught her about-- _She’s Varys’s. Or the Queen’s._ After all, she has not bedded the king yet, and even though Gwenys is only commonly pretty, that wouldn’t stop the king--

“Say something. Has a grumpkin caught your tongue?”

Rhaenys swallows, but her words are locked in her mouth again.

“I see,” Gwenys says after a while, and she moves to the couch in Rhaenys’s room.


	11. light

When Rhaenys wakes up the next day, she still can’t speak.

She hides it, smiling and nodding like a little doll. Gwenys doesn’t inquire about her, and Rhaenys gives no indication Gwenys is in the room. It’s as if they’re strangers, and Rhaenys notices other things about Gwenys-- how small her head is, how thin her hair, how the spots on her face are not as beautiful as she’d thought. It is as if morning has come, and Gwenys is not as lovely as Rhaenys once saw her to be. _She is a Lannister spy, or a Baratheon catspaw._

Until Rhaenys needs help to dress, and Gwenys won’t acknowledge her. Rhaenys burns with anxiety, with humiliation. Taking a breath, Rhaenys snaps her fingers as she’s seen some other court ladies do. A flash of shock followed by anger passes over the younger lady’s face, and then Gwenys helps her dress reluctantly. Her fingers, pulling tightly at Rhaenys’s gown, burns through her clothes onto her skin. Spy, or not, a sin to the gods or no, she wants to turn around and kiss her-- she bites her tongue. Rhaenys feels her heart hammering, and her stomach grows tight and warm at the same time. She remembers Gwenys’s tongue, Gwenys’s small hands on her skin, how skillfully they played her body like--

She takes a deep breath, and Gwenys hisses in irritation. Rhaenys flinches at the noise, expecting a comment about how to hide, how she has made another mistake, to get another hidden warning, but Gwenys does none of that. Gwenys merely takes a comb, and starts combing Rhaenys’s hair, perhaps with a bit more pressure than proper, but it is bearable, and somehow relieving, to feel the teeth scraping against her head. Gwenys braids her hair roughly, tugging at the hair and twisting it almost painfully, so tears come to Rhaenys’s eyes, but she can’t register it. She could mayhaps make a noise, but then Gwenys would want to talk, and she can’t talk. Not now. And not to a Baratheon bird.

When Gwenys leaves for breakfast, Rhaenys repeats what the maesters had done to her when fear (her oubliette) had stolen her tongue, until she can speak again. “Rhaenys,” she is finally able to say in a small voice. “Rhaenys, Aegon, Elia, and--” she cannot say her father’s name. She cannot say her uncle’s name. She wants to curl up in bed, never leave it, and-- “Rhaella,” she says finally. Rhaella, for her grandmother, the Mad King’s wife-- she had accepted her captivity but had escaped it by dying. _I will only if I must._

“Rhaenys,” she says again, but she does not mean herself, she means her namesakes-- Rhaenys Targaryen the First, who rode a dragon and died in Dorne, Princess Rhaenys The-Queen-Who-Never-Was from whom the Velaryons descend from, and her half-namesakes-- the women who were named after the woman she was named for-- Princess Rhaena the dragonrider of the Black Brides, The Half-Year Queen who had been the Realm’s Delight, Lady Rhaena of Pentos who had been one of the last dragonriders and who was sister to both the Broken King and the father of The Unworthy and the Dragonknight, and her own grandmother. She is named after women who ruled the realm and rode dragons, who ruled the Seven Kingdoms and made peace with Great Houses.  Rhaenys is such a _Targaryen_ name, that it does not even need to said who her family is-- her name sings that on its own.

She can take pride in her name, if nothing else, for the women who bore it. All but one were dragonriders and all were loved. She wonders what they would think of her, half-Martell and skittish, a woman-lover and a hostage.

* * *

When Gwenys comes back, Rhaenys tries to take courage from the bravery of her namesakes. “I apologize,” Rhaenys says. _She cannot be a Baratheon’s eyes, she is too kind._ “I-- my dream was being in the Black cells, and I was scared.” _I turned five in the dark. I turned nine-and-ten in the dark._

Gwenys doesn’t respond. _I have hurt her. She despises me._

“I think it best you continue to look for your marriage. I would only bring scorn to your name.” Gwenys had good as said she had no maidenhead, and Rhaenys can’t bear to think how her prospects would be further ruined by her companionship. “I think it best. . . I think it best I dismiss you from my service.”

Gwenys flinches as if slapped. Rhaenys’s heart jumps-- will Gwenys hit her? _Will Gwenys kiss her_?

“Dismissed,” Gwenys says at last. “Dismissed for my marriage prospects, from the granddaughter of the Mad King, from the daughter of a raper and kidnapper. No, my lady-- that would hurt them even more, and start rumors that would damage me.”

Rhaenys wants to weep. It was no use, Gwenys did not care for her, Gwenys was upset and angry at her, Gwenys wanted to hurt her. “I would dismiss you as my bedmaid. You may sleep in your rooms. You may still help me dress--” it slips from her lips, because Rhaenys cannot stand to lose her fully, even now, and she cannot have Gwenys angry at her.

“I think not,” Gwenys says, with ice in her voice. “I will leave-- it’s best not to be with you, I think you were correct in saying that. I will leave your service-- you won’t dismiss me.”

“Yes,” Rhaenys says. It is the best she can do. _Gwenys was true,_ she realizes. Gwenys was true-- not an informer for the king or the Queen or the Hand. Rhaenys wants to weep, for now she has driven away her only friend.

Gwenys leaves, but as the door is shutting, she sticks her head in. “Yes?” Rhaenys asks, a wild hope rising in her chest.

“Lady Stark has kidnapped Lord Imp,” Gwenys says. “I thought it best you know, before you see anyone.”

* * *

Last time there was war that enveloped the realm, a war that wasn’t easily crushed, a Targaryen sat the Throne while his son kidnapped a Stark betrothed to a Baratheon. To defeat the Targaryens,  both Stark and Arryn wed Tully, and Baratheon took a Lannister to bride after his win. Now a Baratheon sat the Throne, while his Stark Hand’s Tully wife kidnapped the Lannister Queen’s brother.

Rhaenys is alone now, but she can’t stand the paranoia that people are watching her even more now. During the Dance of the Dragons, her book said, the parties were known as the Blacks and the Greens, because of what Lady Alicent Hightower  and her distant grandmother Queen (then Princess) Rhaenyra wore. She cannot wear grays now, nor her preferred white, nor blues or dull reds. She perhaps could wear crimson, but she has never worn a crimson gown, because of the stories she’s heard of her brother, from Cerenna Lannister.

_“My uncle Lord Tywin wrapped up your baby brother in a crimson cloak to claim him as a Lannister’s prize, and to hide the blood. They say he was unrecognizable, because his head was smashed in against a wall. Be good, or you’ll be executed and wrapped in crimson to match.”_

So she wears black, and tries to wear as much gold as she can-- necklaces, overdresses, hairnets. Anything to make her seem neutral, to be supporting no side but loyal to the King. _Look at me,_ she wants to say. _I am as loyal as your children._

She can feel the eyes on her more. She does her best to play with the children-- with Lady Sansa Stark, and her friend Jeyne Poole, with Princess Myrcella and with the Queen’s ladies. She stays away from books and embroiders crowned stags and sews with the palace women, trying to paint herself as harmless as possible, to make sure it does not seem like she favors one side over the other.

Rumors spin around the Red Keep, about the West going to war against the North and Riverlands, and the King leaves it. The King has sent his Hand away in disgrace, the King is leaving his Imp good-brother in the hands of the Tullys, the Kingslayer is storming the Eyrie and taking Lady Arryn as a paramour to bind up the near-war, Lady Arryn has killed the Imp by throwing him off a mountain, Lady Stark had been trying to marry the Imp to her sister because no one else was willing to marry either of them.

* * *

Rhaenys avoids Gwenys as best as can. She sometimes catches glimpses of her, and though at first they make something in her chest ache, she grows used to it, and one day she can see Gwenys flirting with Ser Tallard, and it doesn’t hurt. She hopes he can be good to her. _I bed with women and men,_ Gwenys had said, so it shouldn’t surprise her that Gwenys is flirting with a man. _Even if he_ is _a hedge knight. Gwenys is a lady, so she should look at least to a true knight, not a hedge knight. A landed knight, at the very least._

She’s happy to see Gwenys doesn’t seem to be thinking of her. It’s safer that way-- for the both of them. Rhaenys won’t be lectured on their unnatural closeness and her wantonness  as she was with Cerenna Lannister. She knows Varys must know, but it must somehow suit the Spider for now to not share. Or perhaps, the Concl doesn’t care. Either way,  Rhaenys has not gotten a new handmaiden, but she must look out if the maid looks anything like Gwenys, is stunningly pretty, or prefers women. With Cerenna Lannister it could have truly been a kissing game gone wrong, her kiss with the maidservant plain wantonness, but with Gwenys her appetite could not have been denied. She had kissed men before--  the potboy, the hedge knight whose name she had never known, the knight in the Red Cloaks, Theon Greyjoy, but none she has let go so far, none she has kissed more than once.

Perhaps Varys thinks Rhaenys spurned Gwenys and Gwenys left. It isn’t quite so far from what happened, so perhaps that will be what is thought, and Gwenys will be safe-- from her father, who would want her married off when he returns from fighting the Mountain, or her father’s heir, or the king or the Queen.

* * *

 

And then the king comes back from his hunt early, gored by a boar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys!  
> This is nearing the end of the story, and though it's been written for a few months-- since August-- I'm loosing the motivation to continue posting, or making the second part.  
> If you like it, please comment. They really make my day.


	12. decision

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys! Sorry this took so long to get up-- there's been some serious family stuff happening, and I've been trying to start on the follow-up so I can start getting it posted after the next chapter.  
> CW: Suicide idealization and heavy anxiety in this chapter!

Fear surges into her, and she feels like she’s back in her oubliette in Casterly Rock. Tight and dark, and she can see no way out. Because she knows the viciousness of the Lannisters, who would imprison a young girl for no reason but perhaps to use her in later years, kill a king they was sworn to protect, smash her baby brother’s head against a wall, rape and kill her mother with her baby brother’s brains and blood still on his hands, wrap up her baby brother’s corpse to give it to the king, lead an attack on Mummer’s Ford, wipe out two Houses and their children, force their father’s mistress to walk naked in the streets and banish her.

She knows now-- she had been thinking, hoping, praying, that she had several years before King Robert was to die. She ought to have known better. She ought to have spent more time adoring Prince Joffrey, ought to have more time showing fear and flattery towards Queen Cersei. The Lannisters, killing a king they have sworn to protect, would not hesitate to kill another to set one of their own blood on the Iron Throne. (She wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that they had a hand in killing Lady Lyanna Stark in Dorne so that the only possibilities to marry King Robert were the Mad Maid of Hightower, one of Lord Tyrell’s sisters,  or Lady Cersei of House Lannister)

But that was not so, he is dying _now_. Perhaps there is the slightest chance he will survive-- she will stay for that. Surely Maester Pycelle will save him, if he can. He’s the king. But best to take no chances, and do the best she can to have the Lannisters know she will be as loyal to them as she was to King Robert.

One dress of scarlet, with some gold. That’s all she needs. She dresses herself, her skin prickling and dirty. Only after she’s clothed does she realize she’s been weeping. _They wrapped my brother up in one of these, and now I am wrapped up, too._ It feels wrong, disgusting, sickening on her skin, but-- perhaps if Robert lives she will have more time to endear herself to his heir.

But _crimson_ , _crimson, crimson--_ she tears it off her skin as if it was fire. Only when it’s on the ground in tatters can she almost breathe. It is off her now, but King Robert is dying, dying, dying--

* * *

She finds Gwenys.

“Go to Dorne.” She has collected all her jewelry, all her items of value save the necklace Uncle Oberyn gave her, and she presses them in Gwenys’s hands. “I beg you-- if you ever cared for me at all, go to Dorne to see my uncles.”

“Why?” Gwenys demands, letting them fall to the stone.

Rhaenys wants to weep, and she knows she must look awful. She still can’t breathe without a hitch in her throat, she can’t look at herself without seeing a body wrapped in crimson cloth. “I need you to give them a message. They won’t trust anyone else.” Rhaenys’s lover for a night or two-- they must, they must.

“King Robert is dying, and you want me to go to Dorne.” Gwenys’s voice is skeptical, implying that she believes Rhaenys is being treasonous.

“Tell my uncle that I did it. Tell both of them.” Every light is harsh and bright, her breaths shallow, and Rhaenys’s eyes can’t focus on one thing-- they jump around, and her skin itches, and she feels cramped and small. “Tell my cousin-- tell the princess--” she cannot say _My cousin Arianne_ , because if she does, then she cannot go through with this. “Tell Princess Arianne I’m sorry I’m making her break her vow. Tell-- tell my-- tell Lady Nymeria Sand that I thought myself in love with her once. Tell Lady Tyene that I’m sorry.”  There, that is it-- all the people who care for her, save perhaps Gwenys.

“Please,” she adds. “Gwenys, you’ll be well-rewarded-- they’ll make a good marriage for you-- tell them you loved me once and how. They will help, I know it.” She kneels, picking up the gold Gwenys had let fall. “Please, Gwenys. I need this.”

She doesn’t know what it is that makes Gwenys give a slow nod. “I’ll leave tomorrow with my brother,” Gwenys says at last. “To Dorne. For you.”

Rhaenys doesn’t know what makes her do it, this could jeopardize anything, but she leans forward and gives Gwenys a kiss. A real kiss, and Gwenys responds to it, and Rhaenys feels herself weeping.

“Thank you,” Rhaenys says, not knowing for what she means. Is it Gwenys going to Dorne for her? Gwenys kissing her back, Gwenys helping her when Rhaenys needed her, or Gwenys being her friend? It’s all of them, she decides. (Mayhaps she wanted to be kissed one last time by a pretty lady who cared for her.) She crosses her fingers as Gwenys leaves, hoping only that the other woman will make it to Dorne.

* * *

She has her plan, one that she practices on herself in the mirror, mouthing nonsense words as she twists her face about into the appropriate expressions. Once she’s satisfied with that, she moves onto a next step. She will not give Joffrey the pleasure of killing her, or having her given away. _Aerion Brightflame drank a cup of wildfire to make himself a dragon._ Well, she does not a cup of fire to sip, and she does not think to make herself a dragon, but she will do what she feels she must all the same. _Baelor the Blessed starved himself to death._ It is a slow death, one that she cannot control-- when they know her plan, what if they force her to eat, or execute her themselves? _Jaehaera and Helaena threw themselves from their towers._ She had considered that, but her bedchamber’s window is not far away enough for the moat for her to be certain, and she is not surefooted enough to climb to a good height without notice. _Daeron the Drunk and Aegon the Unworthy drank and whored their way to death._ But Rhaenys cannot whore herself out without being found out, and drinking her way to death would take far too long. _The Iron Throne killed Maegor._ But she can’t make her way to the Iron Throne without being heavily escorted, as if even after all these years, she’s still expected to make a run to sit on it.

So she will use poison, because unless she is able to overpower a lightly-armored guard for a moment, she cannot kill herself with a sword. She’s known this for years, she realizes, head suddenly clear and she cannot see crimson on her hands. She’s known this since Prince Joffrey cut a cat open. After all, did not both maesters and septons agree King Maegor was cruel to animals first?

She has sweetsleep. Not enough-- she has saved a bit over the years, grains she’d skimped and saved from when she was sewn shut and needed help to sleep through the pain, before she took to milk of the poppy when it was said she could not risk taking any more. She has perhaps two pinches saved up, in a pinch in a pouch sewn into a doll, and half-pinches in a small pocket replacing a tassel on a drape, and another half-pinch disguised as face powder.

She’ll need one more-- soon, now, and be able to bring it back undetected.  She knows how to. One pinch will give a dreamless sleep, and all she needs say is that she’s she has been having dreams of the last king’s death, that she dreams she hears her mother screaming, she dreams of the Black cells.

Those are not lies, she tells herself. She has dreamed of those before, and much and more and worse besides. She has dreamed she was her mother, she has dreamed she was her brother, she has dreamed she was Jaehaera and Helaena, she has dreamed she was Alys Harroway and Elinor Costayne and Jeyne Westerling and Rhaena. She has dreamed she was so many women, so many children that at times she does not believe she is dreaming herself.

She will only have to dream once more, and then she will be safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Speaking of the next part-- would you prefer it in almost unrelated one-shots moments, or a written-out story with an actual plot? Leave something in the comments if you have a preference!


	13. choice

She approaches Grand Maester Pycelle that night, as he leaves King Robert. She has taken care to don black and gold, to wear garnets in gold in her ears. She has let her hair loose around her shoulders-- a woman’s trick, she has heard, to make herself younger, as it’s rumored Maester Pycelle is fond of young whores. But she is nine-and-ten, and fire will take her maidenhood, never a man.

“I have troubles sleeping,” Rhaenys says, twisting her hands. It is not hard to let fear show on her face. For once, she is unaccompanied, all the queen and king’s men off doing something else. Without them, she is alone, and near-anything can happen, anyone can hurt her, anyone can stop her. “Of late, I have oft had disturbing dreams.”

The septons and some maesters claim Targaryens has true dreams, so she is not surprised to see Pycelle stroke his beard, with perhaps half an inch of worry on his face. “Dreams are dust, my lady,” he responds, as if to try to convince her.

“You misunderstand me, Grand Maester.” She flatters him, she thinks. She hopes. “I don’t dream of ordinary things-- I dream of my past. I dream of being locked in the cells in this castle, and at times I think of another time that--” she shakes her head, tears in her eyes. They almost surprise her-- she did not think that she could weep. “I dream of noises in the dark, of scitterings and of screams, only some of which is my own. I dream of being locked in a cell, so small I could not breathe.”

“You are safe, my lady Rhaenys.”

She remembers him, from when she was still a princess. She remembers laughing at him and running around him, climbing on his lap to tug at his beard, asking if her lord grandfather will mayhaps smile at her today instead of scowling. She remembers seeing him when she is five, and realizing who he was, running at him and weeping into his red velvet robes, having to be pried off. She’d loved him once.

“I-- I know I am safe. I have done nothing, and the Beggar Prince and his sister have not done more.” Oh, she hopes. If it turns out they have, her next sleep might be in a dungeon instead of forever. “King Robert is so strong, surely he must survive. I have been praying day and night the gods are kind.” That much is true-- she has lit some candles, sang a few prayers, knelt a couple of times to alters and windows. Robert had arrived the day before, and Rhaenys is one of many praying.

“You care for the King, my child?” Pycelle’s hand brushes at his beard.

“How can I not?” Rhaenys fixes a look of puzzlement on her face. “He cleaned the throne Mad Aerys sullied. I remember bits of him, my lord Maester. Those are in my dreams near-every night, when I do not dream of blackness and screaming. Mad Aerys, with his long fingernails and his horrid breath and long hair, a monster on the Throne. He lets me stay here,” she continues earnestly, “when it would have been simpler to send me to the Silent Sisters or some far bannerman he trusts, or with his brothers of Dragonstone-- a dreary place, though I have no true memories of it-- and of Storm’s End, which has well earned its name.”

“Would milk of the poppy serve you, my lady Rhaenys?” He looks almost thoughtful. She has no illusions that he is taken in-- more likely he wants to stop her ramblings, and wishes to sleep.

“No, my lord. My dreams are worse when I take the poppy. It dulls the pain when I need it during my moonblood, which I consider more important than the dreams, but it will not suit my needs this time.” Rhaenys casts her eyes down, as if in embarrassment. She would be embarrassed, if she was not on her way to sleep until the end of days, as no good woman speaks of her moonblood pains without being asked by a maester.  “I want only to pass a night without dreams so I may be better rested in the morning.”

She is aware of how she looks, drawn and wan, a pale shadow of her meek self. Perhaps he can see the scratches on her arms, the way her eyes jump around, the stink of fear blooming from her. Perhaps he wants only to sleep. Perhaps, somewhere in his cold and lying ( **traitorous** ) heart he feels sorry for the child who laughed at him. Perhaps it is the Mother, hearing her as a child, or the Smith hammering open his feelings. Whatever the reason, he gives her an inclination of his head. “If you will wait here, my lady, I will bring you a pinch of sweetsleep.”

She could almost kiss him. He leaves and returns with the sweetsleep in a sewn pocket, which, along with a cup of weak wine. Perhaps he is too tired to watch her take it, most like he does not care.

She forces herself to walk back to her room, feeling almost dizzy with fear. She must look as she always does, or they will _know._ Ser Jaime Lannister slew her grandfather in his gilded armor on his Throne and sat on it as her grandfather bled out. Had he known? Her grandfather was the Mad King, a tyrant who thought nothing of burning men in wildfire. Her grandfather, with cracked yellow nails that looked like curved daggers. Her mother, clutching her baby brother in her arms, screaming, _screaming_ , **screaming--**

She is her room, the door shut, and she is weeping. She does not know how she made it, if she locked the door, how she is so alone right now, but King Robert who killed her father and smiled over the destroyed corpse of her brother wrapped in Lannister silk and locked her in the Black cells is dying, and _oh_ the gods are cruel that she needed him to survive.

Shaking fingers open the pouch, and she licks her finger, rubs it against a grain of white on inside. She lifts it to her tongue, tastes it. Sweet like mother’s milk, sweet like Mother’s mercy. She sniffs it as well, and it is sweetsleep. So he has given it to her, trusted her. Trusted her like how her grandfather had trusted him, like how Rhaenys had been so stupid to trust him when she was young.

A few more grains would calm her heart, steady her breath, but she cannot waste them, dear as the grains are. What might calm her heart might steal her away from the comforting arms of the Stranger. She crosses to a mirror, and rips it from her stand. It breaks, and one shard is sharp enough to tear apart her doll. Perhaps it is gone-- no, it was undiscovered, forgotten, or ignored. She sticks her fingers into the stuffing, and worms it out-- another small pouch, tightly sewn shut. She picks her stitches out, ripping at them with her nails. Two pouches, two pinches. One more, that’s all she needs.

One more, to save her, half of that in her face powders, the rest in her drapes, if-- it’s still there! The bag-- she rips out her stitches, and smells, and it is still sweetsleep.

She is scared.

She is scared of Prince Joffrey, how cruel he is. She remembers when she was much younger, she’d thought mayhaps Robert would wed her to Joffrey, so Viserys could not claim her, so that all might say that Robert’s line were the true kings. She had never asked, but she saw Robert’s hatred some time soon after, and knew it was not true. She remembers lighting candles when she heard about Joffrey, the cat, and the kittens.

She is scared Joffrey will-- rape her, ruin her, cut out her tongue and burn her to see if Targaryens could stand fire, have her thrown off the towers to see if she could fly, whip her bloody to see if Targaryen blood was any different than the blood of mortals, bind her to an iron chair and heat it until the flesh burns off her back-- she can smell flesh burning, she thinks, charcoal and beef and putrid and nauseatingly sweet. She can _taste_ it, acrid and thick-- she has never truly forgotten, merely thrown it to the back of her mind and locked it away--

She will not be lucky enough to go to even the Silent Sisters or the Faith, she sees that now. Perhaps Joffrey has even heard of Rhaenys’s tastes and would rip out her female parts because she has no need to have children, especially now.

Her hands shake as she opens her box of face powders, and finds the small bowl her last portion of sweetsleep is.  

 _It is just sleep,_ she tells herself. _I’ll go to sleep, and never wake. I’ll be safe. I won’t need to fear him, or anyone again._

 _I can be with my mother. I can be with my brother._ She has heard it debated what was after death, if there was nothing, if you were with your loved ones. Even nothingness would be better than how she would fair in Prince Joffrey’s court.

She fills of goblet with water. She does not know how the powder reacts to water-- she had taken her sweetsleep on the tongue, baked in treats-- so she takes care not to use a jug.

She has heard of ladies who picked out their dresses, worn their finest jewels, and had the maids brush their hair before they killed themselves. Rhaenys needs nothing but her uncle’s necklace that she has never taken off. Her uncle is not here now, so he cannot run and save her.

Perhaps this was always going to happen. Perhaps there was no way out. In what was her first life, she and Aegon might have fought for the Throne she wants no part of in this one. Or perhaps she would have rose the realm in Rhaenys’s Rebellion for the rights of her firstborn girl-child, starting yet another Targaryen Dance, against her brother-husband and younger son. Or she sat the Throne, and Aegon would rise against her. Perhaps her grandfather would have arranged that Rhaenys and Elia were killed for something. Perhaps the gods had never wished for her to live a long and healthy life.

She would die as she lived-- meek, and quiet. She would die as she had always wanted to live-- in control, by her own will.

 _Promise me you will never make you hold you again_ , Arianne had said. Rhaenys had agreed, but Arianne would hold her body when Joffrey came to the throne regardless. This way, Arianne would hold a whole body. This would be better, easier, simpler, and hurt them less.

But--

Myrcella’s sweet nature, Tommen’s love of cats, Gwenys’s wide brown eyes, Lady Nym’s dark hair, Lady Tyene’s eyes contrasting against her skin, Princess Arianne’s large liquid eyes set in a caring face. And Prince Oberyn, Prince Oberyn the Red Viper most of all, with his widow’s peak, and her mother’s eyebrows.

Guilt stabs her. _Elia_. Elia had fought, and now her daughter was-- trying to assert control of her own death. Her daughter was wiping out the last trace of her, ending Elia’s bloodline. She could have other chances, she could-- she wants her mother, she realizes in a flash of pain. She wants the mother she can no longer remember. Thin-wristed, thin-browed Elia, with curling black hair, and browner skin.

Rhaenys drops one pinch of sweetsleep into her goblet. She consolidates the other two pinches, and shoves it in a drawer of her chest. She pinches her nose, and drinks the water, hoping she has done it right.

She walks to over to her bed, lies down, and closes her eyes to black. There is always tomorrow, if she needs it. For now, she will sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the first part is officially done! ^-^


End file.
